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Old Comedy and ‘;Character’: Some Comments

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2009

R. G. Ussher
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Extract

Modern Aristophanic scholarship is based on the belief that Aristophanes' plays are funny. Such a belief has not been universal; in antiquity, his characters and their language were regarded, at times, with strong distaste. Aristotle, for one, was not amused: indeed, he would have thought Aristophanophiles scarce gentlemen, since only an ⋯παίδευτος (an uneducated man) could relish the Old Comedy's γέλοια (E.N 1128 17 ff.). The pleasures appropriate to ignorance and learning could be seen (he contended) by comparing the old comedies (whose laughter was raised by α⋯σχρολογία, ‘obscenity’) and the new (which, achieving this same goal by ὑπόνοια, was fitter for gentlemen and scholars). Old Comedy's adherents, in fact, countenance buffoonery, and that is vastly different from wit (E.N. 1128a 15; Rh. 1419b 8).

Type
Research Article
Information
Greece & Rome , Volume 24 , Issue 1 , April 1977 , pp. 71 - 79
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1977

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References

NOTES

1. See (for text) Kaibel, G., Comicorum Graecorum Fragmenta (Berlin, 1899), pp. 50 ff.Google Scholar; (for discussion) Starkie, W. J. M., The Acbarnians of Aristophanes (London, 1909), pp. xxxviii ff.Google Scholar

2. Nauck, A., Aristophanis Byzantii…Fragmenta (Halle, 1848Google Scholar; repr. Hildesheim, 1963), p. 249.

3. For discussion, see my Characters of Tbeophrastus (London, 1960), pp. 4 ff.Google Scholar

4. Moral Essays ii.Google Scholar

5. Boiling, G. M., AJP 23 (1902), 319–21.Google Scholar

6. Denniston, J. D., The Greek Particles2 (Oxford, 1954), p. 559.Google Scholar

7. On women in Aristophanes see Dover, K. J., Aristophanic Comedy (London, 1972)Google Scholar; in Menander, Elaine Fantham, Phoenix 29 (1975), 44 ff.Google Scholar; in Greek literature generally, Lloyd-Jones, Hugh, Females of the Species (London, 1975), pp. 25 ff.Google Scholar