Old Comedy is the first period of the ancient Greek comedy, according to the canonical division by the Alexandrian grammarians.Mastromarco (1994) p.12 The most important Old Comic playwright is Aristophanes – whose works, with their daring political commentary and abundance of sexual innuendo, de facto define the genre. The only extant plays of Old Comedy are credited to Aristophanes. There are only fragments and 'testimonia' of all other Old Comedy playwrights and plays.
Origins and history The word "comedy" (, kōmōidía) derives from the words for 'revel' and 'song' (κῶμος, kōmos, and ᾠδή, ōidē) and according to AristotleThe Poetics 1449a11, Wikisource English translation s:The Poetics#IV section IV comic drama actually developed from song. The first official comedy at the City Dionysia was not staged until 487/6 BCE,Clouds translated by Peter Meineck with introduction by Ian Storey, Hackett Publishing 2000, p. IX by which time tragedy had already been long established there. The first comedy at the Lenaia was staged later still,ibid p. xix only about 20 years before the performance there of The Acharnians, the first of Aristophanes' surviving plays. According to Aristotle, comedy was slow to gain official acceptance because nobody took it seriously,The Poetics 1448b38–1449b, Wikisource English translation s:The Poetics#V section V yet only 60 years after comedy first appeared at the City Dionysia, Aristophanes observed that producing comedies was the most difficult work of all.Aristophanis Comoediae vol. 1, F. W. Hall and W. M. Geldart (eds), Oxford Classical Texts, Knights line 516 Competition at the Dionysian festivals needed dramatic conventions for plays to be judged, but it also fuelled innovations. Developments were quite rapid and Aristotle could distinguish between 'old' and 'new' comedy by 330 BCE.Nicomachean Ethics 1128a 21–24
The origins of the Old Comedy were traced by Aristotle to the komos or celebratory festival processions of ancient Greece, and the phallic songs that accompanied them.S Halliwell, Aristophanes: Birds and other plays (Oxford 1998) p. xvii and p. x Although the earliest Athenian comedy, from the 480s to 440s BCE, is almost entirely lost, it is clear that comedy had already crystallised into a highly structured form, with the chorus playing a central role.S Halliwell, Aristophanes: Birds and other plays (Oxford 1998) p. xxx-i The most important poets of the period were Magnes, whose work survives only in a few fragments of dubious authenticity, and Cratinus, who took the prize at the City Dionysia probably sometime around 450 BCE. Although no complete plays by Cratinus are preserved, they are known through hundreds of fragments: he was noted in antiquity both for a mastery of plot and for the obscene vehemence of his attacks on Pericles.J Boardman ed., The Oxford History of the Classical World (Oxford 1986) p. 176
Aristophanes and his contemporaries
Aristophanes satirized and lampooned the most prominent personalities and institutions of his time, as can be seen, for example, in his scurrilous portrayal of Socrates in The Clouds, and in his racy anti-war farce Lysistrata. Aristophanes was only one of a large number of comic poets, however, working in Athens in the late 5th century BCE; his biggest rivals were Hermippus and Eupolis. Classical literary criticism placed Aristophanes somewhere between the harshness of Cratinus and the smoothness of Eupolis.H Nettleship, A Dictionary of Classical Antiquities (London 1894) p. 67
All the Old Comedy writers worked within a highly structured format – parodos, agon, and parabasis – which paradoxically offered maximum scope for improvisatory flights of fancy.I Ousby ed., The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English (Cambridge 1995) p. 195 Song, dance, costume, and chorus all played important roles, as did the parody of the ‘senior’ drama, tragedy.S H Butcher, Harvard Lectures on Greek Subjects (London 1904) p. 175 and p. 181-4 Possibly due to the influence of tragedy was the important role of a heroic figure in Aristophanic comedy: as Northrop Frye put it, “In Aristophanes there is usually a central figure who constructs his (or her) own society in the teeth of strong opposition”.N Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton 1971) p. 43 The diminished role of the protagonist (and chorus) in his latest works marks a point of transition to the Middle comedy.S Halliwell, Aristophanes: Birds and other plays (Oxford 1998) p. 202
The trend from Old Comedy to New Comedy saw a move away from highly topical concerns with real individuals and local issues towards generalized situations and stock characters. This was partly due to the internationalization of cultural perspectives during and after the Peloponnesian War.Ralph Rosen, Aristophanes 3, D. Slavitt and P. Bovie (eds), University of Pennsylvania Press 1999, p. xivClouds translated by P. Meineck with introduction by I. Storey, Hackett Publishing 2000, p. viii For ancient commentators such as Plutarch Comparison of Aristophanes and Menander and Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1128a22-25 New Comedy was a more sophisticated form of drama than Old Comedy. However, Old Comedy was in fact a complex and sophisticated dramatic form incorporating many approaches to humour and entertainment.Clouds translated by P. Meineck with introduction by I. Storey, Hackett Publishing 2000, p. VII In Aristophanes' early plays, the genre appears to have developed around a complex set of dramatic conventions, and these were only gradually simplified and abandoned.
The City Dionysia and the Lenaia were celebrated in honour of Dionysus, the god of wine and ecstasy. (Euripides' play The Bacchae offers the best insight into fifth century ideas about this god.)Clouds P. Meineck (translator) and I. Storey (Introduction), Hackett Publishing 2000, p. viii Old Comedy can be understood as a celebration of the exuberant sense of release inherent in his worship.Clouds P. Meineck (translator) and I. Storey (Introduction), Hackett Publishing 2000, p. xix It was more interested in finding targets for satire than in any kind of advocacy.Andrewes, Antony. Greek Society. Pelican Books 1981, p. 247 During the City Dionysia, a statue of the god was brought to the theatre from a temple outside the city, and it remained in the theatre throughout the festival, overseeing the plays like a privileged member of the audience.Sommerstein, Alan (ed). Aristophanes: Lysistrata, The Acharnians, The Clouds. Penguin Classics 1975, p. 18 In The Frogs, the god appears also as a dramatic character, and he enters the theatre ludicrously disguised as Hercules. He observes to the audience that every time he is on hand to hear a joke from a comic dramatist like Phrynichus (one of Aristophanes' rivals) he ages by more than a year.Frogs Wikisource English translation s:The Frogs; original Greek text lines 12–18 This scene opens the play, and it is a reminder to the audience that nobody is above mockery in Old Comedy—not even its patron god and its practitioners. Gods, artists, politicians and ordinary citizens were legitimate targets; comedy was a kind of licensed buffoonery,Andrewes, Antony. Greek Society. Pelican Books 1981, p. 248 and there was no legal redress for anyone who was slandered in a play. There were certain limits to the scope of the satire, but they are not easily defined. Impiety could be punished in fifth century Athens, but the absurdities implicit in the traditional religion were open to ridicule.Sommerstein, Alan (ed). Aristophanes: Lysistrata, The Acharnians, Clouds. Penguin Classics 1975, p. 17 The polis was not allowed to be slandered, but as stated in the biography section of this article, that could depend on who was in the audience and which festival was involved.
For convenience, Old Comedy, as represented by Aristophanes' early plays, is analysed below in terms of three broad characteristics—topicality, festivity and complexity. Dramatic structure contributes to the complexity of Aristophanes' plays. However, it is associated with poetic rhythms and meters that have little relevance to English translations and it is therefore treated in a separate section.
Topicality Old Comedy's emphasis on real personalities and local issues makes the plays difficult to appreciate today without the aid of scholarly commentaries—see for example articles on The Knights, The Wasps and Peace for lists of topical references. The topicality of the plays had unique consequences for both the writing and the production of the plays in ancient Athens. Individual masks: All actors in classical Athens wore masks, but whereas in tragedy and New Comedy these identified stereotypical characters, in Old Comedy the masks were often caricatures of real people. Perhaps Socrates attracted a lot of attention in Old Comedy because his face lent itself easily to caricature by mask-makers.Aristophanes: Lysistrata, The Acharnians, Clouds A. Sommerstein, Penguin Classics 1975, p. 31 In The Knights we are told that the mask makers were too afraid to make a caricature of Cleon (there represented as a Paphlagonian slave) but we are assured that the audience is clever enough to identify him anyway.Knights lines 230–233 The real scene of action: Since Old Comedy makes numerous references to people in the audience, the theatre itself was the real scene of action and theatrical illusion was treated as something of a joke. In The Acharnians, for example, the Pnyx is just a few steps from the hero's front door, and in Peace Olympus is separated from Athens by a few moments' supposed flight on a dung beetle. The audience is sometimes drawn or even dragged into the action. When the hero in Peace returns to Athens from his flight to Olympus, he tells the audience that they looked like rascals when seen from the heavens, and seen up close they look even worse.Peace 821–823 In The Acharnians the hero confronts the archon basileus,The Acharnians Wikisource (original Greek) lines 1224–1225 sitting in the front row, and demands to be awarded first prize for a drinking competition, which is a none too subtle way for Aristophanes to request first prize for the drama competition. Self-mocking theatre: Frequent parodying of tragedy is an aspect of Old Comedy that modern audiences find difficult to understand. But the Lenaia and City Dionysia included performances of both comedies and tragedies, and thus references to tragedy were highly topical and immediately relevant to the original audience."Greek Drama" Peter Levi in The Oxford History of the Classical World J. Boardman, J. Griffin and O. Murray (eds), Oxford University Press 1986, p. 176 The comic dramatist also poked fun at comic poets and he even ridiculed himself. It is possible, as indicated earlier, that Aristophanes mocked his own baldness. In The Clouds, the Chorus compares him to an unwed, young motherClouds lines 528–533 and in The Acharnians the Chorus mockingly depicts him as Athens' greatest weapon in the war against Sparta.The Acharnians lines 646-651