I

The comic dramatists of the fifth century b.c. were notable for their preoccupation with poetics – that is, their frequent references to their own poetry and that of others, their overt interest in the Athenian dramatic festivals and their adjudication, their penchant for parody and pastiche, and their habit of self-conscious reflection on the nature of good and bad poetry. I have already explored these matters at some length, in my study of the relationship between comedy and literary criticism in the period before Plato and Aristotle.Footnote ¹ This article continues the story into the fourth century and beyond, examining the presence and function of poetical and literary-critical discourse in what is normally called ‘middle’ and ‘new’ comedy.

These conventional labels ‘middle’ and ‘new’, a legacy of Hellenistic literary scholarship, are unsatisfactory in all sorts of ways. They are significant in the sense that they acknowledge a degree of change and development in the comic genre over time; but an evolutionary model of literary history, artificially divided into distinct (and more or less arbitrary) periods, seems neither appropriate nor useful.Footnote ² This is why I prefer the formulation ‘later Greek comedy’. Nevertheless, one of the recurrent questions which scholars rightly ask of this material, and which is relevant to our topic here, is the extent to which comedy changed after the fifth century. Did comedians of the fourth century and later continue to write about literary matters in the same way as their predecessors, or can we detect significant changes in their attitudes?

One might reasonably expect to see some changes, perhaps, given that the intellectual context of the later Classical period was different in some respects from the world of Aristophanes and his contemporaries. As we are informed by numerous scholarly accounts, literary criticism and literary scholarship had become firmly established by the mid to late fourth century as distinct disciplines, incorporating a greatly developed interest in literary aesthetics, style, rhetoric and related concerns. The Greeks had moved closer to a culture of written texts, readers and book ownership. A number of works and theories seem to be based on the concept of ‘literature’ as an entity, and on the related idea of ‘classic’ texts and authors. The dramatic festivals themselves now included an increasing number of revivals of great works of old drama.Footnote ³ Surely enough, as we shall see, all these currents are reflected in the remains of the comedy of the period. But actually (as I have already shown elsewhere) most of them were already present, in one form or another, in fifth-century comedy. It seems to me that the importance of the fourth century as a time of intellectual change has been overemphasized, and that the emergence of literary criticism (as such) needs to be backdated by a few decades. At any rate, in the area of poetics the later comedians seem to resemble their predecessors extremely closely in comic technique and subject matter. The same old ideas and jokes are continually being recycled. There are a few new variations on old themes, of course, but what is really interesting is how little change and development we see in later comedy in this particular area. Instead there is a remarkable degree of continuity.

A number of recurrent literary themes can be detected in the comedy of the fourth century and later: a concern with originality (or the lack of it); a particular (but not exclusive) focus on books and readers; an interest in the effect of poetry on its audience; the selective use of poetry as a source of moral guidance; the synkrisis of comic and tragic genres; and a heavy reliance on intertextuality, allusion, quotation, pastiche and parody (especially of Euripidean tragedy). All of these themes find parallels in the work of fifth-century comedians. The fragmentary nature of the evidence means that it is often impossible to see how these themes are being developed by the later poets. It is also very difficult to discern differences in treatment between different authors. It seems that they were all drawing on the same shared repertoire of material,Footnote ⁴ but no distinctive voices or perspectives seem to stand out from the crowd. Of course, the problem is not simply due to the poor state of the evidence. Even if the plays survived intact, we would still have to deal with the interpretative difficulties associated with the very nature of comedy as a genre: the jokes, the irony, the absence of a clear authorial voice, the typical obliqueness of the comedians' approach to their subject matter and so on.

All the same, the surviving material, such as it is,Footnote ⁵ can reveal a great deal to the student of comedy or the historian of ideas. In the first place, it shows us that the later Greek comedians continued to function as literary critics (of a sort), engaging with the intellectual and cultural world around them, and reflecting or popularizing – or perhaps criticizing – current ideas. Our material also provides a valuable indication of audience tastes in this period. It is clear that people continued to find literary-based humour appealing, at a time when other comic themes (e.g. politics and sex) seem, for whatever reason, to have fallen out of favour. This fact is suggestive in terms of the social and political context of comedy as well as the composition of the audience (or ‘target’ audience).Footnote ⁶

II

The question of poetic originality is one which arises very frequently in poetry of all types and periods, often with a concomitant sense of anxiety or awkwardness.Footnote ⁷ How to be truly original when so many others have already gone before? Poets (like scholars) often confront this problem by making exaggerated statements about the novelty or importance of their own work. Such statements are of course rhetorical rather than literal: they have to be read as a form of agonistic self-defence, not as straightforward self-description.

A number of fourth-century comedians can be seen drawing their audiences' attention to poetic novelty, but it is never absolutely clear what they want us to think about the concept. In Amphis' comedy Dithyrambos (fr. 14) one of the characters is a choregos who sees novelty (in terms of musical accompaniment) as one of the criteria that will help his production to win a prize.Footnote ⁸ It is unclear to what extent this character is to be seen as a counterpart to Amphis himself, but the poet's implied attitude to novelty seems broadly approving. In a similar vein, someone in Anaxilas' Plousioi (fr. 27) declares that μουσική (poetry, literature or music), like Libya in the proverb, is always bringing forth something new. A character in Antiphanes' Alcestis (fr. 30) advocates the principle that in everything one should aim at originality (τὸ καινουργεῖν), words which have normally been read as a metapoetic or programmatic statement.Footnote ⁹ Elsewhere Antiphanes praises the dithyrambic poet Philoxenus for his originality, claiming that his novelty and his music mark him out as the best of all poets by far (Tritagonistes fr. 207).

In these and other fragments where novelty is discussed, it is not always obvious what sort of originality is meant. Does the concept denote new ideas, new styles of writing, new jokes, new types of subject matter or characters, or something else? Sometimes it is connected specifically with musical innovations,Footnote ¹⁰ but often it is left vague. Probably this vagueness is deliberate, in the interests of rhetorical effect: the poets' claims of originality might sound less plausible if one were to start probing too deeply into the details. Nevertheless, novelty – whatever form it may take – is presented as a seemingly admirable characteristic to which a poet might aspire, and it may be that some of these poets genuinely thought they were doing something new.

In fact, comic references to novelty are among the oldest jokes in the book. For many decades comedians had been making tongue-in-cheek claims about the supposed novelty of their own work, while accusing everyone else of staleness or plagiarism.Footnote ¹¹ Even in the fifth century such jokes were decidedly old hat, though that seems to have been part of the fun – for it is clear that we are dealing with a system of stock jokes or running gags. The calculated repetition of familiar material can be a fruitful source of humour if well handled,Footnote ¹² and old jokes about novelty embody a pleasing sense of irony and paradox. The later comedians can be seen as adding to this long tradition of running jokes, in which case their talk of originality will have come across as transparently silly or disingenuous. However, it may be that at least some of these jokes stimulated certain audience members to think more seriously about the nature of poetic originality and its anxieties and pressures.

Antiphanes' treatment of the theme in Poiesis (fr. 189) provides a good example of the problems faced by anyone who would try to pin down a fragmentary comedian to a definite point of view. One of his characters in this play, apparently a comic poet,Footnote ¹³ is not talking directly about the originality of his own work but about the difficulty inherent in trying to saying anything original at all. Tragedians, he says, have it easy, because they take their material directly from myths that everyone knows, in contrast to comedians, who have to invent all their own material (17–18: ἡμῖν δὲ ταῦτ' οὐκ ἔστιν, ἀλλὰ πάντα δεῖ | εὑρεῖν, ὀνόματα καινά κτλ). Comic invention is hard work. Even though the comedians have total freedom of invention, this freedom seems to bring with it a risk of inhibition or creative paralysis. Paradoxically, it is said to be the tragedians who can do anything they please, even though they are restricted far more severely by the formal conventions of their genre.Footnote ¹⁴

It is hard to know what to make of this striking fragment. All we can say for certain is that Antiphanes is playing around (in some way) with a literary-critical idea that will already have been familiar to most of the people in his audience. We would certainly not be justified in interpreting these lines as embodying Antiphanes' own views on poetry. Even if the speaker could be identified straightforwardly with the real-life author himself (which would be impossible, even if the character's name were ‘Antiphanes’), we would still have to allow room for humour, irony and exaggeration. The lack of a dramatic context in which to place the lines makes it even harder to understand just what is going on. It has been assumed, on the basis of its remarks about tragedy, that this fragment comes from an agon with a tragic poet,Footnote ¹⁵ but even if it is from an agon scene, there is no particular need for us to assume that the contest was that of comedy vs tragedy. It could equally be a case of comedy vs comedy, with the poet character defending himself against (real or hypothetical) accusations of staleness and using tragedy merely for purposes of illustration or contrast. Perhaps it might be thought that Antiphanes is depicting a fourth-century comedian who has run out of new ideas – in which case one could make some sort of link between his character's attitude and that of certain other poets who complain that everything they want to do has already been done by someone else.Footnote ¹⁶ But was it really more difficult to be original in the fourth century than in the fifth? Perhaps the joke depends on a quite different underlying attitude: it could just as plausibly be read as an indirect assertion of the comedian's own superiority (despite the difficulty of his task), rather than as anxious apologetics. Or maybe Antiphanes is not actually saying anything at all about novelty, as such, but merely having fun with us, provocatively recycling an old joke on a subject of perennial interest to poetry lovers.

III

Originality is also mentioned by the character in Xenarchus' Porphyra who says (fr. 7.1–3):

As before, it is far from easy to discern what (if anything) is being said about poetic novelty, but it is possible to observe that Xenarchus develops the theme in a slightly different direction from Antiphanes and the others. The speaker here is seemingly not a poet but a fishmonger: the fragment continues with a long, eulogistic description of the resourcefulness and genius of fishmongers as a general class, and it is explicitly said that poets are utterly worthless by comparison. The fact that fishmongers are described as a ‘rather philosophical’ category of person (φιλοσοφώτερον γένος) may make us wonder whether there is a specific type of novelty at stake here: is the speaker implying that poetry lacks conceptual or intellectual novelty in particular? (One recalls that several decades earlier Aristophanes had claimed precisely this type of originality for himself, in contrast with his less sophisticated rivals.Footnote ¹⁷) But in fact fishmongers and chefs are often described in comedy as astonishingly clever or learned individuals (invariably with a ludicrous degree of exaggeration),Footnote ¹⁸ so it may be that there is no special significance to the description. It is also impossible to identify the anonymous ‘poets’ who are being denigrated here. It seems likely that some form of pointed comment is intended. But does Xenarchus have particular individuals in mind? The generalizing form of expression (οἱ not οὗτοι) makes it unlikely but not absolutely out of the question. Or is it that tragedians are being criticized for their lack of invention, in implicit contrast with comedians (as in Antiphanes fr. 189)? Or is it, perhaps, that poets nowadays are being compared unfavourably with the great poets of old (as in Antiphanes fr. 207)?Footnote ¹⁹ Or is the fishmonger dismissing the art of poesy tout court as being inferior to the art of cuisine? None of these explanations can be ruled out. But it is clear, at least, that here novelty is being linked to the language and imagery of food as a way of exploring poetic ideas.

Xenarchus was not alone in inviting his audience to make a connection (of some sort) between poetry and cookery. This connection had already been firmly established by earlier comedians, who made great play with the conceit that literature was food. Numerous passages and fragments of fifth-century comedy depend on the idea that the poet is a chef, that poetry and drama of various types can be ‘consumed’ by its audience, and that literary preferences can be discussed in terms of ‘taste’.Footnote ²⁰ These earlier comedians, who may well have invented the metaphor themselves, exercised an enormous influence on the language of later (ancient and modern) literary criticism.Footnote ²¹ But by the fourth or third century, the idea would perhaps have seemed a commonplace, even a cliché. Comedians such as (for instance) Euphron, who makes one of his characters declare that there is no difference between the cook and the poet (fr. 10), or Anaxilas, who compares little baked fish with the works of Aeschylus (Mageiroi fr. 19), or Straton, who likens lentil soup to tragedy (fr. 1), cannot have been presenting their audience with anything very surprising.

Nevertheless, the concept of food-as-literature was not entirely past its sell-by date. We can detect a little development in the use of the metaphor. One important change is that the figure of the poet and the figure of the chef (or fishmonger, or breadmaker) are no longer always treated as exact counterparts. In fact, as in the Xenarchus fragment just quoted, they now seem to be regarded as rivals. Both of these figures are competing to be seen as superior in techne and originality – and both seem to be trying a bit too hard to impress. Indeed, the boastful chef becomes a familiar stock figure in his own right in later Greek comedy;Footnote ²² and although it cannot be said that the comic mageiros invariably possesses a metaliterary significance, it is still notable that he recurrently functions as a focal point for ideas about novelty, inventiveness and skill.Footnote ²³ The comedians obviously still regard these concerns as central to their genre, even though their attention is shifting away from poets themselves onto other sorts of artist.

The other main change in the presentation of the comic chef is that he is increasingly mentioned in connection with books. This theme continues the long association of cooking and writing, but it also reflects the emergence of the cookery book (or food writing in a broader sense) as a new literary genre in the fourth century,Footnote ²⁴ and of the increasing tendency (which I have already mentioned) to view poetry in terms of books and readers. It is hard to judge the comedians' attitude to these new developments, but the portrayal of chefs as bibliophiles, authors or intellectuals seems to have become quite common. For example, Platon's Phaon (fr. 189) features a man who is quietly reading a new cookery book by Philoxenus.Footnote ²⁵ The section that he is reading happens to be about aphrodisiac foodstuffs and their effect on the male anatomy, so perhaps it is no wonder that he wants to be left on his own to get on with it; but what makes the fragment interesting for our purposes is that it is one of the earliest recorded references to silent reading in antiquity.Footnote ²⁶ Elsewhere Philemon (fr. 114) writes about an astonishingly well-read chef who has not written a book but talks like one: his vocabulary, including rare words (γλῶτται) from Homer, is so recondite that his interlocutor needs to consult the works of Philitas of Cos in order to find out what he means.Footnote ²⁷ Another learned chef in Damoxenus' Syntrophoi (fr. 2) is well versed in Epicurean philosophy and has read all the books of Democritus, as he expects all other chefs worthy of the name to have done. Most of these clever chefs are actually rather silly, irritating characters,Footnote ²⁸ which makes one wonder just what to make of their special association with book learning. The humour could be interpreted in various ways. Does it arise from the incongruity of servants who (like Wodehouse's Jeeves) are better educated than their masters?Footnote ²⁹ Or is it being implied that cooks should leave books and philosophy to those who properly understand them? Or are books (in general) being seen as the special preserve of pompous show-offs? No doubt different audience members (and readers) will have found these scenes amusing for different reasons.

Alexis' Linus (fr. 140) contains a delightful exchange between Heracles and his teacher Linus, which takes place in the library of Linus' house.Footnote ³⁰ Linus invites Heracles to go and select a book roll by reading the labels quietly to himself and deciding which one best suits his taste. The library contains books divided into categories by author and genre, including both prose and poetry, an arrangement which may be representative of a typical fourth-century private book collection:

Here is it more obvious that the so-called cleverness of the literate cook Simus is being undermined or ridiculed.Footnote ³¹ To be named the best cook among actors or the best actor among cooks is scarcely the most glowing of accolades. All the same, Simus is bound to strike us as an extraordinary individual, even if he was not regarded as a total success: few people of this date will have been versatile enough to combine careers as cooks, writers and tragic actors.Footnote ³² (However, Alexis' readers may well have reflected that in a sense most comedians, including Alexis himself, combined the same interests – food, poetry and tragedy.)

Heracles' choice of reading matter fits in with his depiction elsewhere in comedy (especially in the literary-themed Frogs of Aristophanes) as a glutton; but the fact that Heracles picks out a cookery book ‘in preference to so many other writings’ shows that there is an implicitly agonistic model of literature underlying the scene. Heracles is, in effect, being asked to adjudicate between different authors and genres of literature. What sort of literature is best? Now there are no comedians represented in Linus' library (apart from Epicharmus, who is probably regarded here as an author of moralizing maxims rather than comedy),Footnote ³³ but it is hard to avoid remarking on their absence. This library consists mainly of improving, serious literature representing genres (epic, tragedy etc.) that were widely used for educational purposes. But why should comedy not be included? By conspicuously omitting comedy from the list, Alexis can be seen as establishing an implicit contest (as seen so often elsewhere) between comedy and other ‘higher’ or more respectable forms of literature.Footnote ³⁴

The presence of Linus as the title character means that education and μουσική would have featured prominently in the play, but it is not clear how this scene, or the play as a whole, developed. After the lines just quoted, Linus exclaims that Heracles is obviously ravenous (βούλιμός ἐσθ' ἅνθρωπος, 17). This comment seems so abrupt that a lacuna has been suspected, though the most recent editor suggests that ‘we are to imagine some sudden action on Heracles’ part – such as eating the papyrus book roll'.Footnote ³⁵ This suggestion is attractive: it would fit in with what we know of Heracles' voracious appetite (a frequent source of humour elsewhere), and it would underline the analogy between food and literature in a funny and pointed manner if the hungry hero were literally to attempt to eat Linus' book.Footnote ³⁶

There are other points of interest in the fragment, including its physical description of fourth-century book rolls, as well as the anachronism of introducing books into the pre-literate world of the mythical past, but most important, perhaps, is the suggestion that one's choice of reading matter is an indication of one's character. Discussions of literature's moral effect on its audience are found widely in antiquity, as is the idea that literature or style is a clue to the character (or even the dress sense) of the author;Footnote ³⁷ but the notion that literature can reveal something about its reader is much less frequently encountered. The context in which Platon introduces this idea may make us wonder whether it is a product of the growth of book ownership and the transformation of ‘audiences’ into ‘readers’. It could be argued that the activity of silent reading, as depicted in several of the passages mentioned above, was essentially a matter of personal, private choice, in contrast with the more inclusive, social world of performance culture and dramatic festivals. Nevertheless, one must beware of making huge interpretative leaps on the basis of such scant evidence; and in fact a number of fifth-century comedians had already made the connection between a person's poetic preferences and his personality, without any reference at all to books or readers.Footnote ³⁸

The emergence of ‘reading culture’ out of ‘performance culture’ represents a complex process of social and intellectual change. Even though many comedies of the fourth century and later seem to reflect this process in some way, it has to be admitted that the reflections are rather dim and blurry, and it can scarcely be claimed that our fragments help us to produce neat and tidy accounts of literary history. All the same, it does seem significant that the collective sort of literary preference, as exemplified by the award of prizes at festivals, is rather lost sight of in later comedy. Apart from the perfunctory and formulaic tailpieces, containing requests for applause or prayers to Nike, that are found at the end of certain plays,Footnote ³⁹ there is no sign that the comedians were interested in the circumstances of the festival in which they were competing. This is in marked contrast to the work of earlier comedians, to whom the paraphernalia of the festivals and the outcome of the competitions were matters of explicit interest; indeed, for such playwrights the contests seem to have been influential in shaping their views on poetics in general.Footnote ⁴⁰ After the fifth century we do not find any surviving references to the competitions from within the plays; no comedian now seems to say anything about the qualities of his own poetry (except by implication); no comedian ever refers to his rivals or their works; and (crucially) the parabasis, in which the poet figure ‘steps forward’ to address the audience, seems to disappear altogether from the formal structure of comedy.Footnote ⁴¹

Of course, these changes are not entirely due to the fact that the comedians were writing for a reading public. Other equally important reasons have been suggested.Footnote ⁴² In the first place, any comedy or tragedy might now be reperformed frequently, in a wide variety of settings, after its premiere. The ‘exportability’ of drama might well explain the removal of self-conscious references to the specifics of the original context. It has also been argued that later comedy becomes more interested in dramatic realism, in contrast with earlier comedy where the illusion is constantly being broken. Furthermore, it is important to stress that these comedians were not writing solely for readers.Footnote ⁴³ Performance was alive and kicking, and it is clear that the dramatists will still have been concerned with popular approval – some more than others. One ancient biographer records that Anaxandrides would not even allow his plays to circulate as texts unless they had done well in the competition: if he failed to win the prize, he would have the scripts cut up and used for scrap paper rather than revising them as most other poets did.Footnote ⁴⁴ The historical value of this anecdote may well be questionable,Footnote ⁴⁵ but it reminds us that the textual afterlife of plays remains tied up with their performance context and popular reception.

The discussion above raises important questions about the relationship between the comedians and their audience. What sort of person were they writing for, and how did they imagine that people would engage with their work? The plays themselves provide clues of a sort, because of their reliance on intertextual games, allusions and parodies. Even in fragmentary form they obviously contain a very large number of (often recherché) quotations and references to other texts,Footnote ⁴⁶ including authors as diverse as Homer,Footnote ⁴⁷ Chaeremon,Footnote ⁴⁸ Aeschylus,Footnote ⁴⁹ Sophocles,Footnote ⁵⁰ Sosiphanes,Footnote ⁵¹ Theodectes,Footnote ⁵² Sappho,Footnote ⁵³ ChoronicusFootnote ⁵⁴ and Euripides.Footnote ⁵⁵ In other words, they seem to have been aimed at a target audience of people who were well versed in poetry and drama and who were sufficiently familiar with the material to identify the allusions and appreciate all the literary in-jokes. But we do not know enough about the composition of theatre audiences or the reading habits of fourth-century Athenians to be able to pursue these questions, or their consequences, very far.

IV

However, several of the comedians show an interest in the effect of poetry and drama on the audience. (For this purpose it does not always seem to matter whether we think in terms of spectators or readers.) This sort of concern is central to the literary criticism of Plato and Aristotle, who were concerned with the social utility of literature, its moral influences (for good or evil) and its psychological effects. Fifth-century writers, including comedians, had also been interested in such matters. Gorgias and other sophists, for instance, had explored the psychological power of drama and rhetoric, and the nature of illusion.Footnote ⁵⁶ A particularly prominent theme in Aristophanic comedy is the idea that comic and/or tragic drama might be useful for the citizen body, either in terms of the political guidance that it provides or in terms of its moral content more generally.Footnote ⁵⁷ These fifth-century theories are not seen in the remains of later comedy.Footnote ⁵⁸ The playwrights remain interested in the moral effects of drama, but the emphasis now seems to have shifted away from its social and civic benefits. Instead, several comedians talk about drama's ability to improve the personal well-being or inner life of the individual.

The language of medicine is used in this context in a few important comic fragments, where tragic drama in particular is presented as having some sort of therapeutic effect on the mind. For example, Timocles, Dionysiazousai fr. 6 is an important fragment featuring a fairly lengthy (19-line) monologue on the benefits of tragedy. (There may have been much more in the same vein, to judge by this play's metaliterary title, though no other fragments survive.) The speaker begins by observing that mankind is naturally prone to suffering, and proceeds to explain that tragedy has been invented so as to provide a source of comfort or distraction from one's worries (παραψυχὰς … φροντίδων, fr. 6.4). It is specifically the mind (νοῦς) of the spectator or reader that is said to undergo alteration:

The speaker goes on to declare that tragedy benefits everyone, and gives specific examples of tragic characters and situations (Telephus, Alcmeon, Philoctetes, etc.) to illustrate his point. All of these examples denote extremes of misfortune or physical suffering: the point is that no one in real life can possibly have suffered as much as these wretched characters, and thus they are bound to recognize that they are fortunate by comparison.

It has been suggested that this fragment marks a specific allusion to, or even a parody of, the Aristotelian theory of katharsis.Footnote ⁵⁹ This theory itself is not easy to interpret with confidence,Footnote ⁶⁰ and it is considerably more complex and ambitious than what we see in Timocles, but there are several apparent points of similarity between the two authors – the focus on psychology and mental transformation; the discussion of pleasure and education as potential effects of literature on their audience (whether as separate entities or in combination); the attempt to explain why it is that one can get pleasure from painful or distressing subject matter; the binary schema of positive vs negative emotions or experiences; the particular choice of tragic paradeigmata; and the allusion to psychagogia. However, there are also important differences. Timocles is essentially talking about distraction or consolation by means of situational contrast,Footnote ⁶¹ which is not quite the same thing that Aristotle seems to mean by katharsis (he is probably talking about a more profound sort of inner transformation or cognitive shift, however difficult it may be to pin down the details). Of course, the comedian may be simplifying or distorting Aristotle in the interests of humour. But even so, a more crucial factor is that Timocles does not mention the key term katharsis itself; nor is there any mention of pity or fear. These are the really distinctive elements in Aristotle's theory, so if this really is a parody of Aristotle, surely it would be extraordinary for the comedian not to have included them, even if only to give his audience a clear signal of the target of parody. (Of course, these key words may have featured in the portion of the play that does not survive – but that line of argument does not get us very far.)

Even if no specific engagement with Aristotle can be proved, Timocles' comedy seems to reflect contemporary intellectual developments. The idea of drama as curative or therapeutic may owe something to Hippocratic medicine and the dissemination of medical writing and ideas in society more broadly.Footnote ⁶² We could also see it as a development of a theme in earlier comedy, where the dramatists sometimes presented their work as a ‘cure’ for social ills;Footnote ⁶³ or of Gorgias' comparison of the power of words to the power of drugs;Footnote ⁶⁴ or, indeed, of a much older concept in Greek poetics – the idea that poetry's function is to soothe, enchant or distract from one's worldly cares.Footnote ⁶⁵ The nature of the evidence, and the fact that Timocles and the other comedians are playing around with their material in a light-hearted way, means that is hard to be very precise about their influences, or about the significance of their own treatments of the idea.

The analogy between drama and medicine underlies a joke in Axionicus' comedy Phileuripides (‘The Euripides fanatic’), even though the humorous twist is that this form of ‘treatment’ does not always work. On the contrary: here (fr. 3) we are told about people who have become ‘sick’ (νοσοῦσιν) as a result of their excessive admiration for Euripidean lyric songs. One is reminded of the reported outbreak of ‘Euripides fever’ in Abdera, when (according to Lucian) people were so affected by a performance of the Andromeda that they became temporarily insane and ran around singing Euripides' lyrics, imagining themselves to be characters in the play.Footnote ⁶⁶ (I wonder if this story actually owes something to the plot of Axionicus' comedy: is life imitating art, or vice versa?Footnote ⁶⁷)

The poetry-as-therapy motif is also exploited by Philippides (fr. 18) in a way that seems remarkably similar to Timocles' version above:

At first sight, this fragment seems to contain exactly the same idea as the passage above – tragedy as a source of consolation or cure in times of trouble – but there are a few significant differences. First of all, it is Euripidean tragedy that is seen here as especially therapeutic; by contrast, Timocles had emphasized the universal benefits of tragedy in general. Second, whereas Timocles had used tragic situations to provide contrast with real life (people in tragedy have it much worse than we do), Philippides is using tragedy to make a direct comparison with real life (people in tragedy are essentially the same as you and me). Third, the nature of the ‘prescription’ is different in each case: whereas Timocles seems to envisage people in distress going to watch whole plays (or contemplating tragic plots or situations in their entirety), Philippides is talking about the selective quotation of efficacious excerpts. This method of reading differs notably from the outlook of Aristotle's Poetics, which, by emphasizing the importance of plot and the selection and arrangement of material, encourages the reader to look at the play as a whole. (That is not to say, of course, that these different reading practices are to be regarded as mutually exclusive.)

The nature of the benefit that might be conferred on the reader is suggested by the type of quotation that is being used here: it is the opening line of Euripides' Stheneboea, but it is also a moralizing maxim (gnome).Footnote ⁶⁸ Tragedy is full of generalizing statements of this type, which seem to embody a concise (if sometimes cryptic) gobbet of wisdom about the nature of the world, of human beings and their limitations, of the capricious behaviour of the gods, of the changeability of life or similar themes.Footnote ⁶⁹ Such maxims were often excerpted from the plays in which they appeared and treated by readers (of various sorts) as if they represented independent statements from the author's mouth, or general pieces of advice for life. To treat decontextualized excerpts as straightforwardly embodying the play's teaching or authorial message is bound to strike us as a crude oversimplification, but it was obviously a common mode of reading throughout antiquity (and beyond).Footnote ⁷⁰ If Philippides and his contemporaries perceived Euripides as an unusually therapeutic tragedian, it may well have been, in part, because his plays contain considerably more maxims than those of other tragedians.Footnote ⁷¹

It is not just the comedians who use tragic quotations in this way. In fact, the majority of tragic verses quoted by authors in the fourth century and later are treated as a source of moral wisdom or guidance.Footnote ⁷² Tragedy is used either as a source of illustrative or paradigmatic material, to help people understand their own life better, or as a repository of maxims, to be dipped into at will whenever advice or encouragement is required. This tendency is normally taken as an indication that certain works of fifth-century tragedy, notably the works of Euripides, had by this period attained the status of literary classics.

This selective mode of reading had already been reflected – and sometimes undermined – in fifth-century comedy.Footnote ⁷³ In later comedy it is harder to detect anything akin to criticism of the habit. Most of the characters, at least, seem to assume that it is perfectly legitimate to use tragedy in this way. Nevertheless, one can find the occasional note of irony – as in Diphilus, Synoris (fr. 74), which features the following exchange between two characters immediately after some Euripidean (or pseudo-Euripidean) lines have been quoted:

1. (A.) Where the hell are those lines from?

2. (B.) What is it to you where they're from? We're not looking at the play but at the sense.

It seems clear that a distinction is being made between νοῦς (the meaning of individual verses) and δρᾶμα (the play as a whole), and that character B, who is a parasite, is being mocked for twisting the sense of the quotation to suit his own ends. Another comedian who seems to be poking fun at the habit of excerption is Nicostratus (fr. 29), who quotes exactly the same line from the Stheneboea as Philippides in the fragment above:

No matter what the speaker's own character or tone was meant to be (sincere? ironic? faux naïf?),Footnote ⁷⁴ it seems that we are likely to question whether a single line of tragedy can really sum up the whole of life. Indeed, the more one contemplates this Euripidean line, the more banal or obvious it comes to seem – but one could say the same of many other gnomai.

Menander's comedies provide several particularly good examples of paradigmatic or gnomic citation. In the middle of the recognition scene in Epitrepontes, for instance, Syros tries to justify his behaviour by mentioning tragic characters, such as Neleus and Pelias, who found themselves in a comparable situation to his own: τεθέασαι τραγωιδούς, οἶδ' ὅτι, | καὶ ταῦτα κατέχεις πάντα (‘You have seen tragedies, I know that, and so you will understand all this’, 325–6). Even though Syros' comparison is not entirely accurate, it explicitly depends on the view that tragedy corresponds directly to life, and his employment of tragic paradeigmata in the cause of self-defence is the same technique that a forensic orator might use.Footnote ⁷⁵ No particular tragedy is definitely being alluded to here,Footnote ⁷⁶ but later in the same play (1123–6) another character attempts to explain complicated plot developments by quoting specifically from Euripides' Auge (fr. 920):

This citation, which is simultaneously paradigmatic and gnomic, functions in much the same way as the reference to the Tyro story above (and numerous other citations in comedy): if one knows tragedy, one will be able to cope with life more successfully.Footnote ⁷⁷

An additional feature of interest is that both these speakers, Syros and Onesimos, are slaves, as is Daos, the character in Aspis (407–33) who recites an extraordinarily long stream of gnomic quotations from Euripides, Chaeremon, Aeschylus and Carcinus. It is clear that Philippides fr. 18 (quoted earlier) also features a slave offering his master gnomic advice from tragedy. It seems significant that the sort of characters who know literature best, and who can mobilize this knowledge most intelligently, are very often of low social status.Footnote ⁷⁸ The significance of this fact in literary-critical terms (if any) is not easy to discern, though it is obviously connected to the recurrent comic theme (as encountered earlier in the figure of the mageiros) of servants who are cleverer than their masters.

In general, then, the comedians seem to be implying that tragedy can genuinely help one to come to terms with one's life. But in Menander's comedies the question of tragedy's relevance to the life of the audience is complicated by the fact that ‘real life’, as depicted within the plays, is not entirely real. The distinctive, oddly context-free world in which Menander's plays are set, even though it superficially resembles contemporary Athens, owes a great deal to tragedy. Despite the frequent references (ancient and modern) to Menander's supposed realism, it makes better sense to see his plays as taking place in a highly stylized parallel world, made up largely of elements, situations and devices taken from the world of tragedy (whether or not they are explicitly identified as such). As Kathryn Gutzwiller has put it, in a brilliant study of comic metatheatricality, Menander's plays are based on the conceit that ‘life is like a tragedy’.Footnote ⁷⁹ We know that this is not literally true, and so we cannot necessarily trust the lessons that the characters themselves find in the texts of tragedy. Any lessons that we, the real-life audience, take away from the plays will have to be based on our own (complex and individually variable) understanding of the distance that actually separates the world of literature from the world of real life.

It will be obvious from the discussion above that the comedians' scattered remarks about the benefits of drama all concern tragedy. Nothing is said explicitly about the benefits of comedy or other types of poetry. Nevertheless, it is striking that comedy in the fourth century and later started to include excerptable maxims of its own.Footnote ⁸⁰ (There are almost no gnomai in fifth-century comedy apart from paratragic ones – a very significant fact.) It might be concluded from this new development that the later comedians saw it as their purpose to assume some of the didactic or utilitarian function of tragedy.Footnote ⁸¹ Whether or not they were completely serious in this purpose, it seems that the ongoing rivalry between the comic and tragic genres had taken a new direction in this period.

V

Greek comedy, almost from its origins, seems to have been preoccupied with the concept of literary genre, and with intergeneric dialogue: the poets repeatedly explored the limits of their own genre by playing around with elements from other genres. This sort of experimentation seems to have become particularly common in the last few decades of the fifth century. Apart from numerous examples of epic and tragic parody on a large or small scale (including, no doubt, many of the so-called ‘mythological comedies’), one encounters generic hybrids (such as Alcaeus' Komoidotragoidia), comedies which ironically presented themselves as tragedies (such as Callias' Grammatike Tragoidia, Strattis' Lemnomeda, Philoctetes, Phoinissai and others), and comedies which pretended to be satyr plays (Cratinus, Ecphantides and Phrynichus all wrote comedies called Satyrs). Aristophanes is particularly notable for his engagement with tragedy, especially Euripidean tragedy, and it has been argued that he saw his own type of comedy (which he calls ‘trygoidia’) as an alternative to tragedy.Footnote ⁸²

All of these trends are perpetuated, more or less unaltered, in the comedy of the fourth century and later. Titles such as Antiphanes' Poiesis (discussed above), Anaxandrides' Tragikomoidia, Eubulus' Antiope, Timocles' Orestautokleides, Eriphus' Aeolus, Alexis' Lover of Tragedy, Timocles' Ikarioi Saturoi and others (to name but a few) seem to indicate more of the same cross-generic playfulness. To judge by the distribution of titles, there was even more of a preoccupation with tragedy and tragic pastiche than ever before.Footnote ⁸³ The way in which tragic texts are manipulated in the surviving fragments suggests that the comedians continued to use tragedy in the same ways as their predecessors – to draw attention to its artificial conventions and highfalutin diction; to evoke its extreme depiction of emotions as a foil to the comic characters' feelings; to offer an alternative, or subversive, interpretation of tragic myth; to act as a rival to comedy for serious attention or acclaim; or simply to demonstrate the comedians' own detailed and impressive knowledge of literature.Footnote ⁸⁴

As I have already pointed out, there no longer seems to be very much focus on contemporary tragedy: most (but not allFootnote ⁸⁵) of the tragedians mentioned in later comedy are ‘classic’ authors of the fifth century. We have already seen (in § IV above) how the works of these great poets often seem to be treated with a naïve attitude amounting to uncritical admiration or reverence.Footnote ⁸⁶ This attitude might extend, in certain cases, to the poets themselves. Euripides, indeed, seems to have become especially popular among the later comedians and their audiences. The extraordinary frequency with which his plays were quoted and adapted testifies to his status as a classic, but he is also openly praised by numerous comedians, either in general or for specific aspects of his art. Philemon (fr. 153) makes one of his characters declare that Euripides alone understands how to write speeches, and similarly Diphilus, in his Parasitos (fr. 60), praises Euripides' diction, awarding him the honorific epithet ‘golden Euripides’. Axionicus and Philippides both wrote comedies called Phileuripides (‘The Euripides fanatic’ or ‘The lover of Euripides’?), suggesting that Euripides was seen as the sort of poet who could inspire deep personal devotion among his readers and fans, even posthumously. The person in Nicostratus fr. 28 (quoted earlier) who apostrophizes the tragedian as φίλτατε Εὐριπίδη is treating him not just as if he were still alive but as if he were a close personal friend. But the most striking expression of pro-Euripidean sentiment comes from a character in one of Philemon's plays (fr. 118), who says:

This fragment is nowadays well known because it was quoted by an ancient biographer of Euripides (who treated the lines as representing Philemon's own feelings) as ‘proof’ of the increased popularity of the tragedian after his death.Footnote ⁸⁷

It might be supposed, on the basis of this sort of evidence, that a profound shift in critical attitudes had taken place since the days of Aristophanes, in whose plays Euripides often seems to come across as a problematic or maverick figure – the woman hater, the atheist, the chatterer, the pseudo-intellectual, the corruptor of public morals, the sort of man whom Nietszche saw as the ‘destroyer’ of tragedy.Footnote ⁸⁸ It might appear that, in the eyes of the later comedians, Euripides' image has undergone a total transformation, from being out of step with dominant fifth-century trends to being the quintessential representative of his genre (perhaps it is no coincidence that Aristotle, writing in roughly the same period, was able to describe Euripides as ‘the most tragic of the tragedians’Footnote ⁸⁹).

However, it is possible to take a slightly different view of the evidence, and it is important not to overemphasize this apparent change in attitude. In the first place, Aristophanes' attitude to Euripides was not straightforwardly hostile or negative: his sustained interest in Euripidean tragedy, and his deep knowledge of the texts, could equally be taken as signs of critical admiration and respect.Footnote ⁹⁰ The later comedians seem to be simply continuing the tradition that Aristophanes had started, rather than offering a radical reassessment of Aristophanic criticism. Furthermore, it is clear that the later comedians' attitude to Euripides is not one of undiluted veneration or esteem. Several fragments contain more negative criticism or disparaging comments. Euripides' supposedly problematic attitude to women remains a subject for humour, as in Diphilus, Synoris (fr. 74), where several Euripidean verses are quoted as ‘evidence’ of the poet's own misogyny. It appears that not everyone would willingly have committed suicide in order to meet Euripides in person: indeed, one of the characters in Ephippus' Homoioi (fr. 16) lists ‘having Euripides as a dinner guest’ as one of the items in a list of terrible punishments (which also include having to learn the tragedies of Dionysius of Syracuse by heart or listen to the tragedian Theodorus reciting speeches).Footnote ⁹¹ Not just the man and his supposed opinions but also his style of writing was ridiculed: Eubulus draws attention to Euripides' excessive sigmatism in Dionysius fr. 26 (just as Platon had done in his Heortai, fr. 29), quoting a couple of particularly hissy verses from Medea and Andromeda and implying that they lack poetic skill (sophia).Footnote ⁹²

But even if, in general, Euripides still emerges as a classic, we are not obliged to view the classicizing tendency as a distinctively ‘fourth-century’ phenomenon, tied up with conventional literary narratives of creative stagnation and nostalgia for the past. In this as in so many other respects, our authors can actually be seen as continuing a trend from earlier comedy. Aristophanes' Frogs has been seen as extremely influential in the classicizing process, in that it opened up questions of posthumous survival and enduring status for great poets of the past.Footnote ⁹³ In fact Frogs was not unique in this respect. The same comedian's earlier play Gerytades, for instance, was also intensely concerned with dead poets and their legacy, and it has been argued that fifth-century comic parody and quotation in general tended to function as, inter alia, a mechanism of popularization and the establishment of a ‘fan club’ for particular poets and their works.Footnote ⁹⁴ The later comedians, by quoting, parodying and reworking earlier tragedies, are consolidating and perpetuating the status of authors who were already seen as great poets, but they are not attempting to revise or re-evaluate the ‘canon’ (by, for example, adding or removing authors). Nor do they seem to be doing anything substantially different from their predecessors, either in terms of literary technique or in terms of commentary on these authors and their work.

VI

A few words of conclusion are in order, and also a word of warning. The impression that I have given of poetic discourse in later Greek comedy must be regarded as tentative and provisional, owing to the unsatisfactory nature of the evidence and its interpretative difficulties. Nevertheless, a consistent and coherent picture seems to emerge from the meagre remains. Until some more texts should come to light, it is hard to identify any major advances in the treatment of poets and poetry in the work of the later comedians, but it is clear that these writers continued to demonstrate a lively interest in literary-critical matters. The value of this material lies chiefly in the fact that it suggests a certain type of narrative of fourth-century literary history: above all, it is a narrative of continuity and stability. This has important consequences, I think, for our views of the genre of Greek komoidia as a whole. Of course, we are dealing with a living, popular form of entertainment, and of course some changes occurred across the course of many decades, but the comedians' intellectual and poetic outlook, at least, seems to have remained remarkably stable. In this particular respect (to return to the theme of ‘labels’ with which I began), there seems to be no justification for bracketing off ‘middle’ or ‘new’ comedians as separate categories from their ‘old’ comic predecessors. At the end of this survey, I feel convinced more than ever that the late fifth century – the exciting, conceptually inventive golden age of Athens – was the period of really significant change, both in comedy and in poetic theory.