Around Nicomachus, the alleged son of a public slave, who became the collector and transcriber of the city’s laws, a group of men in the service of Athenian institutions takes shape. Radically distinct from that of the magistrates, their activity was well and truly outside the political field, as described in Plato’s Statesman. It brought together slaves and free men, whether they played the role of assistant to the archons or of undersecretaries to certain magistrates. Reading the prytany inscriptions suggests that, within it, the distinction between free men and slaves prevented the formation of a collective identity based on a specific skill and professional dignity. The chorus of bureaucrats that surrounds Nicomachus, in short, is only a mirage. Trapped by the city’s self-representation, such a reading would, however, be erroneous. It undoubtedly underestimates the existence of an administrative culture of which these men, whether they were free or slaves, could be the guardians, and about which our sources are admittedly tenuous. Above all, it ignores the opportunities public slaves were given to accede, if not during their lifetime, then possibly via the intermediary of descent, to the society of free men. Nicomachus, after all, was perhaps the son of a dēmosios, and, if this was the case, it allows us to suggest, on the one hand, that service to the city could lead some of these slaves to see their descendants acquire citizenship and, on the other hand, that citizenship could be acquired through the transmission of professional skills from father to son, which were put to service for the common good. Therefore, it is perhaps through the transmission, over several generations, of a skill used in the service of Athens that the chorus of the bureaucrats of the city came into being, which transcended the distinction between free men and slaves.

Freeze frame: It’s Boedromion 12, 403. With his troops, Thrasybulus is marching up the Acropolis to make a sacrifice to Athena, after several month of exile. At first sight, we can only distinguish men: On one side stand the people of the town, frightened spectators of this intimidating procession; on the other, the victorious democrats – citizens, foreigners, slaves and freedmen – who are already preparing to forgive. As the Athenian civil war comes to an end, women appear absent, as if erased from the picture. But their presence can be sensed in the background, not only among the anonymous crowd who has come to watch, but also on the Acropolis itself. In a majestic role, the priestess of Athena Polias was necessarily present at Thrasybulus’ side, since she was to help him accomplish his sacrifice in the honor of the goddess. In all likelihood, the priestess of Athena played a central role in this ritual sequence, embodying the very specific participation of Athenian women in the resolution of the conflict. Her name – Lysimache – is known to us thanks to an extraordinary piece of evidence: After her death a few decades later, the priestess was commemorated with a bronze statue erected on the Acropolis, the work of a famous sculptor. But how did he manage to flesh out this fleeting and evanescent figure? Erased from history as written by men, she was nevertheless a central figure of the community; it is only necessary to take the trouble to read the ancient sources between the lines, being as attentive to what they express as to what they conceal. By means of some inscriptions and, especially, thanks to a play by Aristophanes performed in 411, it is possible to give back to Lysimache her full human dimension and to restore her singular mode of action within the city that went against the clichéd view of Athenian women as passive and legally in the minority. Better still, if we listen carefully, we can give voice to all those who surrounded her – not only the women directly involved in the cult of Athena, but more widely all Athenian women, including the foreigners to whom the priestess served as a mouthpiece in these ‘dark times.’

This chapter examines some of the specific methodological challenges of reading dramatic fragments intertextually. It also explores some broader aspects of intertextuality, literary culture, readership, orality, and memory in relation to Greek drama in general. It begins by noting the tendency of commentators and critics to use the formula ‘cf.’ when identifying any sort of similarity between fragmentary texts (or between fragmentary texts and extant ones). But ‘cf.’ on its own is inadequate as an interpretative strategy. This chapter investigates what types of textual relationship are actually being signified by ‘cf.’, and whether it is always possible to know for certain. It also asks to what extent the poor state of the evidence hampers our understanding of textual relations between fragmentary plays, and it raises the problem of how to discern which text is responding to which. These questions are addressed by looking in detail at a number of case studies from works by Aeschylus, Phrynichus, Glaucus, Ion, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes.

Participatory Athenian democracy has inspired many political thinkers, despite its imperialist atrocities, slavery and the subordination of women. Pericles is an ambivalent figure, and it is dangerous to see him as the embodiment of a golden age. His speech over the war-dead can be seen as a noble democratic manifesto or the calculated work of a demagogue. In a debate about the punishment of Mytilene, as depicted by Thucydides, Cleon uses the language of reason to work on the emotions, and is a paradigm of the populist or ‘demagogue’. We can see the ‘demagogue’ as an aberration from true democracy, or see the word itself as a standard weapon that can be wielded in any democratic contest. The comic dramatist Aristophanes offers us insight into Cleon’s performance techniques that embrace face, arms and voice, and into the minds of those who supported him. In his Gorgias, Plato theorises the problem of rhetoric. Gorgias was a Sicilian who taught the Athenians that rhetoric was an art which they could pay to learn, and for Plato this was a fundamental flaw in his nation’s democratic enterprise.

This chapter considers the nature and development of Greek literary history before Aristotle, a generally acknowledged watershed. It covers all sorts of reflections on the literary past and studies the assumptions and paradigms at work in our earliest sources. While highlighting the continuity of tropes and stock narratives, it also seeks to understand the development of literary history in relation to the technology of writing and in relation to an emergent ideology of classicism, which literary historical thinking both reacted to and further strengthened. The first section briefly surveys immanent literary history in poetry from Homer to Aristophanes, typologising tropes which would endure through the ages and suggesting a skeletal metahistory of early literary history. The second and third sections then move forward in time and shift from poetry to prose in order to consider in greater detail two specific work. Glaucus of Rhegium’s On the Archaic Poets and Musicians and the Mouseion of the sophist Alcidamas, early instantiations of, respectively, a macroscopic narrative of progress and a literary biography, prefigure many core characteristics of later ancient literary history. A conclusion returns to the bigger picture to consider the distinctive value of studying ancient literary history on its own terms.

A striking feature of old comedy is its cannibalising of contemporaneous Athenian literature. The comic poets integrated the funeral oration into their comedies in three ways. Their first way was to bring on stage the funeral oration’s ancestors. Aristophanes characterised his choruses as such in three of his surviving plays. When these ancestors came to praise their own military exploits, they used the same terms as the funeral speeches and privileged the same historical period: the Persian Wars. Aristophanes clearly used this characterisation of the chorus for the sake of persuasion. By having these proud old men support the effort of a comic protagonist to bring peace, he defused the criticism that this effort went against the martial reputation of the Athenian people. The second way in which old comedy integrated the funeral oration was to warn theatregoers about the general dangers of praise. While Aristophanes sometimes quoted praise from dithyrambs as an example of what public speakers said in order to deceive the people, at other times, Aristophanes quoted from funeral speeches. The third way in which comedy engaged with the funeral oration was the deliberate confounding of the epitaphic genre’s characterisation of the Athenians as selfless and courageous.

This chapter discusses connections between the Sophists and their wider intellectual context. It argues for the value of the term “enlightenment” as a characterization of the period in two respects: as pointing to a widespread self-consciousness of intellectual change, and as encompassing a range of discourses and thinkers beyond the philosophical. Using Aristophanes’ Clouds as a guide, the chapter discusses three modes of thinking that are characteristic of the sophistic period as an enlightenment, understood in these senses: an interest in empirical research and collection, particularly in the human social realm; a concentration on methods of argument and widespread employment of antilogistic forms; and a skepticism toward causal reasoning concerning divinity and the unseen generally. These three modes of thinking are found importantly among the Sophists, but are manifest widely beyond their thought, and are best understood as characteristic practices and attitudes of a fifth-century enlightenment.

This chapter refutes Dover’s arguments that anachronisms and an unstageable change of speaker demonstrate the text of the (second) Clouds that we have to be an incomplete revision, intended as a text only for reading, not for performance.

This chapter sets out briefly the case for seeing in the character Dicaeopolis in Acharnians not (as proposed by many) an alter ego of Aristophanes, but his competitor Eupolis, from whose political stance in his comedies Aristophanes is circumspectly distancing his own.

The chapter first reviews hypotheses concerning the nature of ‘Milesian tales’. Harrison 1998 had proposed a modified version of Bürger 1992, suggesting that in this genre an anchor-narrator told of scabrous events in a quasi-ethnographic account of his visits to various places; Jennson 2004 had suggested that the Amores transmitted as Lucian’s pointed to Μιλησιακά in which the key-narrator recounted adventures that were both his own and told to him by others, i.e. just what we find Encolpius doing in the Satyrica; and Regine May had argued in 2010 that the prosimetric ass-papyrus P.Oxy. 4762 preserves part of Aristides’ Μιλησιακά, ‘Milesian Tales’. After noting these hypotheses the chapter briefly explores the impact of Μιλησιακά on the Greek novels. Finally it investigates their earlier history, suggesting that just as Sybaritica, ‘Sybaritic tales’, linked to them by Ovid, are shown by Aristophanes’ Wasps already to be a form of λόγοι, ‘stories’, circulating in the 420s BC, so too Μιλησιακοὶ λόγοι, ‘Milesian stories’, may have already been current in Athens by then, linked to Miletus’ fame as a provider of dildoes (cf. Aristophanes’ Lysistrata) and as Aspasia’s city of origin.

This chapter examines several passages in Aristophanes’ Wasps where I argue that obscene language and sexual elements in the dramatic action have been missed by readers and commentators.

This chapter argues that it was unlikely that an Attic theatre audience, many of whom will have studied with a sophist, could not tell the difference between Socrates and a sophistic teacher of rhetoric, and that it was significant that it was only well into the play, when Aristophanes had established his ‘Socrates’ as like the ‘real’ Socrates in several respects, that he started to bring out the role of his stage-figure in teaching rhetoric – a role he gave him because his purpose in Clouds was to κωμωιδεῖν, ‘make fun of in a comedy’, both Socrates and sophists. This argument hangs to some extent on the socio-economic distribution of spectators in the theatre of Dionysus in Athens, and on the size of that theatre.

The first chapter looks at one half of song, namely rhythm. It seeks to understand how the idea of rhythm relates to the movements of the body, and particularly the heartbeat, starting with the earliest uses of the word rhythmos in poems of Archilochus of Theognis, moving back again to Homer and then forward to Aristophanes and Plato to understand the shifting ways that rhythm was understood to connect poems and bodies.