This article bridges a gap in the study of Aristophanic humour by better demonstrating how individual jokes (in this case, the para prosdokian ‘contrary to expectation’ joke) contribute to the wider comic scenes in which they are embedded. After analysing ancient and modern explanations and examples of para prosdokian jokes, this paper introduces the concept of ‘comic bit’, a discrete unit of comedy that builds humour around a central premise, and establishes how para prosdokian jokes contribute to comic bits in a way that recent theories of para prosdokian cannot account for.

This article examines scatology in Aristophanes Assemblywomen, and argues that the play sets out to subvert comedy's normal scatological poetics. Old Comedy is usually a genre characterized by corporeal and scatological freedom. The constipation scene in Assemblywomen 311–73 is therefore highly unusual, since, while its language is scatological almost to the point of excess, it spotlights not scatological freedom but scatological obstruction. This article argues that this inversion is expressly linked to the play's reversal of gender roles as part of its ‘women on top’ plot, which is in turn conceived as a direct challenge to Old Comedy's normative poetics. The article further suggests that recognizing the Assemblywomen's less than straightforward relationship to the norms of Old Comedy may help us to reassess how, and indeed whether, we should use Aristophanes’ plays to make conjectures about the genre as a whole.

Greek comedy, especially New Comedy, contains many incidental descriptions of domestic interiors. This article argues that such descriptions constitute a valuable and overlooked source of evidence for historians of the classical Greek house; they are also of interest to literary critics in that they contribute to the thematic and conceptual meaning of the plays. The article presents and discusses all the surviving comic evidence for houses, including many previously neglected comic fragments, as well as a key scene from Menander's Samia which is more detailed than any other surviving literary depiction.

The paper offers a new approach to utopia in early and classical Greek texts from Homer to the fifth century. The model is based on four motifs regularly occurring in ‘utopian texts’, that is, descriptions of places that are distant in time and/or space. A comparative analysis of such texts (drawn from Homer, Hesiod, Pindar, Old Comedy and Herodotus) and of how they manipulate the four motifs sheds new light on specific problems (as, for example, the relevance of Herodotus’ Ethiopian episode, or the role of the myth of Perseus in Pindar's Pythian 10) and encourages more nuanced readings of famous texts, such as Homer's account of Scheria.

This article argues that ἡμεροσκόπος at Lys. 849 constitutes a pun based on iotacism, a well-known feature of female speech in fifth-century Athens aptly illustrated by Socrates in Plato's Cratylus. By describing herself as ἡμεροσκόπος ‘day watch’ pronounced as ἱμεροσκόπος ‘lust watch’, Lysistrata perverts the military term associated with the occupation-plot to a sexually charged word associated with the strike-plot. Its use would be very appropriate in a scene in which the φαλληφόρια of the men (not just Cinesias’ but later on also the Spartan herald's and the Spartan and Athenian delegates’) become the subject of a φαλλοσκοπία by the women (not just Lysistrata but later on also the chorus of women) and perforce also by the onlooking audience. Additional contemporary evidence from orthographic mistakes made by schoolboys suggests that Athenian elite women of the late fifth century were the avant-garde of socially prestigious innovations such as iotacism, which would definitively catch on with the male population in the fourth century and change the face of Greek phonology forever.

This article argues that the defamiliarization caused by extensive repetition, termed ‘semantic satiation’ in psychology, was used by ancient poets for specific effects. Five categories of repetition are identified. First, words undergo auditory deformation through syllable and sound repetition, as commonly in ancient etymologies. Second, a tradition of emphatic proper-name repetition is identified, in which the final instance of the name is given special emphasis; this tradition spans Greek and Latin poetry, and ultimately goes back to the Nireus entry in the Catalogue of Ships. Third, repetition is used for wordplay, where the final instance of the repeated term not only is emphasized but also incurs some change to its meaning or shape. Fourth, the incantatory repetition of divine names in hymns and cultic invocations amplifies a sense of divine presence behind and beyond the repetend. Fifth, repetition of half and full lines by different speakers in Old Comedy serves to undercut and parody the original sense of the repeated words. Extensive repetition in ancient literature was never merely ornamental but was used for a range of specific auditory and semantic effects with distinct and identifiable structures.