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From Aristophanes to Menander

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2009

W. Geoffrey Arnott
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Extract

At the beginning of 405 b.c., fourteen or fifteen months before the final catastrophe overtook Athens in the Peloponnesian War, Aristophanes produced the Frogs. It is the last extant play of Old Comedy proper. Its plot is at times discursive, its subject-matter is passionately tied to the city in which the play was conceived, and its structure is largely controlled by such traditional and formal Old Comedy elements as the agon and parabasis. The Frogs won first prize. In 316 b.c., just eighty-nine years later, if we accept a plausible emendation in the Bodmer papyrus, Menander in his turn won the first prize at the same festival with his Dyskolos. The Dyskolos is the first extant play of the New Comedy to which we can give a firm date. Its plot is tightly knit, its subject-matter is universal, and its structure is largely governed by a new set of formal elements. Aristophanes' Frogs had a chorus of initiates, who charmed the audience by their nostalgic evocation of the old annual procession to Eleusis, suspended at the time because of the Spartan occupation of Decelea. This chorus of initiates sang and danced between the dialogue scenes a series of specially composed, memorable lyrics which were relevant to the plot, to the city, and to the period; they and their leader also delivered the parabasis. This vivid, lively, functional chorus is replaced in Menander by only a dim shadow: a κ⋯μος of tipsy young men who have no function whatever in the plot, who serve merely to entertain the audience in the intervals between the five acts with a song-and-dance routine whose words are not preserved and possibly were not even specially composed for the play by its author.

Type
Research Article
Information
Greece & Rome , Volume 19 , Issue 1 , April 1972 , pp. 65 - 80
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1972

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References

page 66 note 1 Menander and Plautus: A Study in Comparison (London, 1968), i. Over a century before Otto Ribbeck had said something very similar in his Berne lecture Über die mittlere und neuere Attische Komödie (Leipzig, 1857), 3: ‘It is as if one of our descendants wished to make up Goethe's or Schiller's works from the German dictionary of the Grimm brothers and occasional references in bellettrists.’

page 66 note 2 In his essay on Greek Comedy in Fifty Years of Classical Scholarship (edited by Platnauer, M., Oxford, 1954), 118.Google Scholar

page 67 note 1 Scaliger, J. C., Poetices Libri Septem (Lyons, 1561), i. 7, p. 12.Google Scholar

page 67 note 2 Dioniso xl (1966), 41.

page 67 note 3 Cf. particularly Maurach, G., Acta Classica xi (1968), 1 ff.Google Scholar

page 69 note 1 Studies in Later Greek Comedy (Manchester, 1950', 19702), 62Google Scholar. On the chorus in Middle Comedy see especially Maidment, K. J., CQ xxix (1935), 1 ff.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 72 note 1 1453a36–9.

page 74 note 1 Cf. Handley, E. W., BICS xii (1965), 47 ff.Google Scholar; Kassel, R., Eranos lxiii (1965), 8 f.Google Scholar

page 75 note 1 Footnotes in this paper have been reduced to the minimum. If bibliographical references had been produced for every unsupported, dogmatic, or anticipated statement and instance, the small print would have luxuriated and swamped the large. The largest number of these references would undoubtedly have been to Webster's seminal book, as all experts in this subject will be well aware. Let this footnote, therefore, testify, however inadequately, to my own indebtedness to this book and to its author's stimulating discussions. I play the page to his Wenceslas.

page 75 note 2 p. 12.

page 76 note 1 S.v. ‘Αναξανδρίδης.

page 77 note 1 Cf. Proc. Cambridge Phil. Soc. cxcvi (1970), 9 ff.Google Scholar

page 77 note 2 Dohm, H., Mageiros (Munich, 1964).Google Scholar

page 78 note 1 p. 119.

page 79 note 1 Cf. Handley's edition of Menander, 's Dyskolos (London, 1965), commentary pp. 252 f.Google Scholar

page 80 note 1 The quotation comes from the first chapter of The Bride of Lammermoor.

page 80 note 2 This is the written form of a lecture delivered variously in Leeds, Manchester, Edinburgh, and elsewhere; its author has profited greatly from suggestions made by members of its audiences.