Greek Drama · Part 16 · Comedy · B2
Middle Comedy
Part 16 of Greek Drama: between Aristophanes and Menander lies a lost world. For about seventy years, from around 400 to 320 BCE, Athenian poets wrote hundreds of comedies about cooks, parasites, boasting soldiers, philosophers and gods behaving badly. Almost all of them are lost; we know them only from short fragments quoted by later writers. Hedging and inference from evidence (probably, seems to have, we can infer, the fragment suggests, it is unlikely that), and the language of evidence and reconstruction, with Philo, Sophia, Marcos and Demetria.
Tonight we play detectives. After Aristophanes, comedy changed. The wild political jokes and the great choruses slowly disappeared, and new characters appeared: hungry parasites, boastful cooks, clever slaves. Hundreds of these plays were written. Almost every one is lost.
From fragments, Marcos: a few lines here, a speech there, quoted in other books by people who enjoyed them. Our Library has some of them. Tonight you’ll learn to work like a scholar, saying exactly how sure you are about each conclusion. It’s the grammar of honest uncertainty.
Ancient scholars, many of them in Alexandria, divided Athenian comedy into Old (Aristophanes), Middle and New (Menander). Middle Comedy covers roughly 400–320 BCE. We know the names of about fifty poets and hundreds of plays: Antiphanes is said to have written some 260 plays, and Alexis about 245, and Eubulus over a hundred. But no complete Middle Comedy survives. What we have are fragments, short passages quoted by later writers, especially a huge book about dinner parties written by Athenaeus…
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