Aristophanes

Many poets of Old Comedy are known by name, but Aristophanes is the only one whose plays survive whole. All eleven extant comedies are his; his predecessors and rivals are known from fragments.^[1] What the sources say of his life and career is gathered here. The plays and their dates are on the next tab.

Dates. He was born about 445 BC and died in 386/0.^[2] His surviving comedies run from the Acharnians to the Wealth of 388. The sources differ by a year over the Acharnians: one chronology dates it to 425, Seidensticker to 426.^[3] Either way, the plays document only a short stretch of the history of Old Comedy. Comedy was added to the official programme of the City Dionysia in 486, and it was surely being performed earlier.^[4]

The Cambridge Companion to Greek Comedy puts his birth, in all likelihood, shortly after 450 BC, and his death after 388. He wrote about forty comedies, so the eleven that survive are about a quarter of his work. That is a far larger share than survives of Aeschylus or Sophocles. The eleven can be dated, most of them precisely, and they span his whole career.^[5]

Two festivals. At the City Dionysia, from 486, one day of the festival was given to the comic competition.^[6] Seidensticker, following Storey, puts five comedies on the programme of that day.^[7] The Lenaea was older and “more inward-looking”. It was held in the depths of winter, in January–February.^[8] There tragedy and comedy were late additions to an ancient festival, and comedy seems to have ranked relatively higher than at the Dionysia.^[9]

One of Aristophanes’ characters contrasts the two festivals: at the Lenaea “the foreigners are not here yet” (κοὔπω ξένοι πάρεισιν, koupō xenoi pareisin).^[10] The Frogs won first prize at the Lenaea of 405.^[11]

A poet and his chorus. A poet “sought a chorus” from the archon, and the archon “gave a chorus” to those he selected. The first phrase is attested in Aristophanes (Knights 513).^[12] At the end of the fifth century Aristophanes entrusted the training of the chorus (chorodidaskalia) for several of his plays to Callistratus. His reasons are unknown.^[13]

Naming names. Comedy, unlike tragedy, attacks individuals by name. Aristophanes ridicules Socrates and Euripides. He attacks Nicias, Demosthenes, Pericles, Alcibiades and, again and again, Cleon, openly or in transparent disguise.^[14] Euripides is a central figure in the Acharnians and the Thesmophoriazusae, and the butt of jokes in other plays.^[11]

Besides Aristophanes, the leading poets of Old Comedy were Eupolis and Cratinus.^[7] With Aristophanes they make up the comic triad. Unlike Pherecrates and Crates, these three did not shrink from direct political attack.^[15] At the end of Plato’s Symposium, Socrates can only with difficulty make Agathon and Aristophanes admit that one poet could write both tragedy and comedy. No playwright is documented as having done both.^[16]

A listener to lyric. At Frogs 1314 and 1348 he parodies Euripides’ prolonged setting of the first syllable of εἱλίσσετε (heilissete), “twirl”.^[17] This was a fifth-century novelty: only then did musicians begin to divide a long syllable between two notes.^[18] At Acharnians 633–638 he mocks envoys who flatter Athens with lyric tags, “violet-crowned” and “shining”. The scholiast traces these to Pindar’s dithyrambs.^[19]

The lekythion is the colon — ⏑ — × — ⏑ —. It takes its name from the repeated joke in his Frogs, lēkuthion apōlesen, “lost his little oil-flask”.^[20] How he uses earlier songs is described on the Chorus and song tab.

His name in the ancient metricians. Hephaestion calls the anapaestic tetrameter catalectic “the Aristophanean”, citing Clouds 962. It is not so named because Aristophanes invented it, he explains, since it is found in Cratinus and, before Cratinus, in Epicharmus. It is named so “because Aristophanes used it a great deal”.^[21]

Eleven comedies survive. The text quoted on this site is the Oxford Classical Text of F. W. Hall and W. M. Geldart, Aristophanis Comoediae (2 vols, 1906–1907), in the Perseus Digital Library. The dates below are those of the Cambridge Companion’s chronology. Where another source gives a different year, both are shown.

Where the sources differ. Two dates are not agreed. The chronology dates the Acharnians to 425, and Seidensticker to 426. The chronology dates the Ecclesiazusae to 393/2, and Swift to 391. The sources do not discuss the difference, so both are given.

Fantasy and structure. Old Comedy draws its strength from fantastic ideas, which often shape the whole plot. Its scenes are frequently set one after another, rather than one because of another. The agon is a formal contest of argument between two characters. The set pieces, the parabasis and the agon, are worked out in detail. But the plays are built more loosely and openly than tragedies.^[1]

Comedy also goes where surviving tragedy does not: into Hades in the Frogs, into the upper air in the Birds, and up to Olympus in the Peace.^[2] Its plays are as a rule set in an Athens plagued by the Peloponnesian War.^[3] The Ecclesiazusae has been read as sharing the “feminist” tendency of Plato’s Republic, but “probably mistakenly”.^[4]

Lost plays and a second version. A first paeon is the foot — ⏑ ⏑ ⏑. Hephaestion quotes tetrameters of first paeons from the Georgoi, which is not among the eleven. He says that Aristophanes often set cretics in the middle of such lines in his second Thesmophoriazusae.^[5] A fragment of his earliest comedy showed boys at school learning their Homeric vocabulary.^[6] In the Frogs the scene at 1437–1453 is incoherent. One possible explanation is that some of its lines come from a revised version of the play.^[7]

In the metrical handbook. One remark concerns development within the corpus: cretics are especially common in Aristophanes’ earlier plays.^[8]

The comedies are followed here from the theatre to the Alexandrian edition and the ancient commentaries. The Byzantine manuscripts and the printed editions are on the Manuscripts tab. The general story is told on the page How the texts reached us.

Old comedy as repertoire. In 339 BC “old comedy” was introduced at the City Dionysia, as “old tragedy” had been in 386.^[1] For tragedy this meant that one “old” play was performed each year beside the new ones.^[2]

The Alexandrian edition. Under Ptolemy Philadelphus (286–247), Lycophron of Chalcis is said to have produced critical editions of the comedies. Alexander of Aetolia did the same for the tragedies and satyr-plays. Not a single reading or comment from either edition has come down to us.^[3] Comedy was edited on the same lines as tragedy. Which copies served as the basis is unknown. But the wealth of material in the surviving scholia shows how keenly Aristophanes’ plays were studied, although there is no sign that they were still performed.^[4] Monographs on special subjects included one on the characters of comedy, by Hypsicrates.^[5]

The colometry of the lyric passages is credited to Aristophanes of Byzantium. His dates are c. 257–180 BC in one account and c. 255–180 in another.^[6] How far the credit is deserved is disputed.^[7]

A metrical commentary. In the early Roman Empire Heliodorus wrote a commentary on the metres of Aristophanes. It does not survive as a book, but parts of it are in the scholia.^[8] In the fourteenth century it guided Triclinius’ new metrical notes on the plays.^[9]

A school author. Under the Empire, pupils read Homer and the other poets, and tragedy and comedy above all.^[8] The Atticists demanded the diction of classical Athens, and this kept its authors on the school curriculum. New copies went on being made often enough to ensure that most of them survived.^[10]

What the scholia preserve. The scholia carry pieces of this ancient learning into the medieval manuscripts. The scholium on Acharnians 637 traces the envoys’ flattering epithets to Pindar’s dithyrambs.^[11] The scholia on Peace 695–699 report that Xenophanes called Simonides a skinflint.^[12] A lyric of the Peace alluded to the opening of Stesichorus’ Oresteia, and we know this only because an ancient commentator said so.^[13]

In the Ecclesiazusae and the Wealth, the manuscripts give only the word χοροῦ (chorou), “[song] of the chorus”, where a choral passage stood. Whether the songs were never part of the written play, or were cut or lost later, is disputed.^[14]

The rest of Old Comedy. The other poets of Old Comedy survive only in quotations, and the ancient metricians are one channel for them. Hephaestion cites Cratinus and Epicharmus for the anapaestic tetrameter he calls Aristophanean, and Eupolis’ Kolakes for paeonic tetrameters.^[15] A dicolon is a verse made of two cola. Three of the comic dicola are found in the extant plays; the others are known only from fragments. The eupolidean is known from Clouds 518–562 and from many fragments of other poets.^[16] One comic trimeter has five resolutions, as many as the line can hold, and it too is a fragment.^[17]

Comedy in Sicily. Epicharmus wrote comedies at Syracuse earlier than Cratinus, Eupolis and Aristophanes. Aristotle reports that the Dorians of Sicily claimed comedy as their own, and that Epicharmus lived not long before the first Athenian comic poets.^[18] His language looks like the real Doric spoken at Syracuse, not a literary Doric like that of choral lyric.^[19] His plays survive only in fragments. These contain no lyric metre and no clear mention of a chorus, though many of his titles are plural, such as Bacchae and Persians, and may name one.^[20]

The Transmission tab ends with the ancient commentaries. Here the eleven plays are followed through Byzantium to the first printed edition and the texts used today. The general history is on How the texts reached us.

Read in Byzantium. In the ninth century the patriarch Photius wrote a great survey of his reading, and it almost wholly omits poetry. But in his letters he mentions that he had read Aristophanes’ Wealth, a school text.^[1]

The Ravenna manuscript. In the tenth century a burst of copying produced some of the most valuable manuscripts of Greek poetry. Among them is the Ravenna Aristophanes (Ravenna gr. 429), the one medieval manuscript that has all eleven plays.^[2] Its scribe probably also wrote a manuscript of Demosthenes (Laur. 59.9).^[3] The “famous codex Venetus” (Marc. gr. 474) was perhaps among the books that Cardinal Bessarion acquired from the monastery of Saint Nicholas at Otranto. It came to Venice when he gave his library to the city in 1468.^[4]

About 170 manuscripts of Aristophanes written before 1600 survive, some 35 of them from before 1400. The Venetus, of the late eleventh century, has seven plays and is highly valued alongside the Ravenna manuscript.^[5] Aristophanes was kept because Byzantine schools aimed to teach Attic prose and verse. Menander, who had once been the comic author read in schools, dropped out.^[6]

The Suda as a witness. The Suda is a tenth-century encyclopedia. It drew heavily on the text and scholia of Aristophanes, and so it is a witness of some weight to both.^[2] Sometimes it alone keeps the right reading, and the metre can show it. Knights 254 is a trochaic tetrameter. There the manuscripts have the unmetrical ἔφυγε (ephyge), “ran off”, and the Suda has ἔφευγεν (epheugen), “used to run off”,^[7] which the Oxford text prints:

The scheme is — ⏑ — × — ⏑ — × ¦ — ⏑ — × — ⏑ — ‖.^[8] With ἔφυγε, the seventh position, a princeps that must be long, would fall on the short φυ.

In Clouds 215 the Suda has μεταφροντίζετε (metaphrontizete), “an amusing new coinage”. Reynolds and Wilson think it probably correct, and the Ravenna scholiast seems to have read it too. But Hall and Geldart print the manuscripts’ πάνυ φροντίζετε (pany phrontizete). Here both readings scan alike, since με-τα- and πά-νυ are both two short syllables, so the metre cannot decide. At Acharnians 23 editors reject the Suda’s dative ἀωρίᾳ (aōriāi) for the manuscripts’ ἀωρίαν (aōrian).^[9]

The schoolroom and the triad. John Tzetzes (c. 1110–1180) appears to have run a school in Constantinople. He wrote commentaries on three plays. In a note on Wealth 677 he says that he would not lengthen his explanation but for the space left on the page.^[10] By the late thirteenth century, schools read three plays each of the tragedians and of Aristophanes. These were called the “triad”. Tzetzes had commented on just the three comedies that later became standard reading, and most manuscripts of these authors contain only the triad.^[11] The other plays survived just long enough to be rescued by Renaissance collectors.^[11]

Triclinius. Demetrius Triclinius was a schoolmaster at Thessalonica about 1305–1320. He knew that the lyrics of the chorus in tragedy and comedy were meant to respond exactly. He wrote a separate metrical commentary on many plays. For Aristophanes he was guided by Heliodorus’ ancient commentary in the old scholia. In his autograph copies he set his commentary beside the revised scholia, in separate columns.^[12]

The first printed Aristophanes. The Aldine Aristophanes of 1498 is the first large volume for which Marcus Musurus was “undoubtedly responsible”. He built the text from at least four manuscripts, one of which survives in Modena (Estensis a. U. 5.10). He printed the scholia in the margins, as in a medieval manuscript, combining notes of different types. And he restored the text in a number of passages.^[13] Later work by N. G. Wilson (1962) found Musurus’ contribution to the scholia less substantial than had been believed.^[14]

The Aldine edition lacked two plays, Lysistrata and Women at the Thesmophoria. They were first printed in 1515, by the Giunta press in Florence.^[15]

On the stage again. Revivals of Aristophanes began in the universities. A performance of Peace at Cambridge in 1546 seems to have been an exception in its time. In 1886 students of the University of Pennsylvania played Acharnians in ancient Greek at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia. In 1903 Birds was performed in Greek at the opening of the Greek Theatre at the University of California, Berkeley (Van Steen 2014, pp. 435, 438).

Modern texts. This site quotes Hall and Geldart’s Oxford text (1906–1907) in the Perseus Digital Library. On the lyrics, both Companions cite L. P. E. Parker, The Songs of Aristophanes (Oxford 1997). M. S. Silk’s “Aristophanes as a Lyric Poet” (1980) is “essential reading” on their style.^[16]

Levels of style. Comedy moves between levels of style. In short passages the versification rises to the tragic standard. Sometimes this is actual parody of a tragic passage; sometimes it marks a character’s self-importance. Only close attention to the metre will reveal such passages.^[1] One marker is the treatment of stop + liquid. In comic dialogue it does not lengthen a preceding syllable with a short vowel, except in parody of tragedy.^[2]

The language as a whole shows the same mixture. Pointed brevity stands beside extravagant fullness, lofty imagery beside crude obscenity, and colloquial frankness beside paratragic pathos. There are dialect forms, and borrowings from every genre from Homeric epic to the new dithyramb.^[3]

Comic dialogue used much the same metres as tragedy and satyr play, but with looser rules. This holds for Old and New Comedy alike. An audience could recognise parody of tragedy by the verse alone. The opening speech of the Lysistrata has few resolutions for a comedy, yet still too many for a tragedy.^[4]

The comic trimeter

The first four lines of the Acharnians show most of the comic licences at once:

Lines 1 and 4 open with an anapaestic foot. Line 2 resolves the third princeps (πάνυ), and line 3 the fourth (κο-σι). Lines 2 and 3 end in brevis in longo. ἅ (3) is short.^[5] The comic trimeter differs from the tragic trimeter in these ways:^[6]

A resolution is split when a word-end falls between its two shorts. Split resolutions occur in the first foot even across punctuation or a change of speaker. They also occur under elision (Av. 1523), and in fixed phrases such as ἀκούετε λεῴ (akouete leōi), “hear, people”, and αὐτίκα μάλα (autika mala), “this very moment”.^[7] The split anapaest, avoided in New Comedy, is admitted, as at Ach. 6.^[7]

Tetrameters, runs and dicola

Trochaic tetrameters neglect the normal caesura about once in seven lines.^[8] Resolution is somewhat less frequent than in the same author’s trimeters. In drama two shorts now and then stand in the short or anceps position of the first three metra. The syllables scanning ⏑ ⏑ — must then be in one word; in tragedy this happens only for a name.^[9]

Iambic tetrameters catalectic run × — ⏑ — × — ⏑ — ¦ × — ⏑ — ⏑ — — ‖. This “cheerful metre” serves the entries and exits of the chorus, and contest scenes. Three lines in four have caesura after the second metron. Any of the first six feet may be an anapaest, as at Eq. 342–345.^[9]

Anapaestic tetrameters catalectic are frequent in Old Comedy.^[9] Hephaestion names the line “Aristophanean” and quotes Clouds 962:^[10]

The scheme is ⏔ — ⏔ — | ⏔ — ⏔ — | ⏔ — ⏔ — ⁝ ⏑ ⏑ — — ‖. About nine lines in ten have caesura after the second metron, nearly as many after the first, and nearly half after the third.^[11] Here ¦ marks word-end. It normally falls at a metron-boundary, but in 962 δίκαια runs one short past the first metron. Runs of four shorts are avoided, so the resolved metron is normally — ⏖ — —.^[12]

The pnigos. Excited dialogue in iambic or trochaic tetrameters sometimes ends in a burst of ten to sixty metra in the same rhythm. They run in unbroken synapheia to the final catalexis. These are the “systems” or πνίγη (pnigē), “breathlessnesses”, as at Nub. 1443–1451. Anapaestic runs likewise follow anapaestic tetrameters.^[13]

Comic dicola. A dicolon is a verse made of two cola. Three dicola occur in the extant plays.^[14] The eupolidean (Nub. 518–562, and in many fragments by other poets) has the scheme ○ ○ ⏕ × — ⏑ ⏑ — ⁝ ○ ⁝ ○ — × — ⏑ — ‖, that is, gl¨ ⁝ gl¨∧ ‖. The first position of the first colon, and the shared position between the dotted bars, can be resolved (⏑ ⏑). In each colon the first position is usually long. When it is resolved, the second position is always short.^[15]

Vesp. 1528–1537 has × — ⏑ ⏑ — ⏑ ⏑ — ⁝ × ⁝ — ⏑ — ⏑ — — ‖, × D ⁝ × ⁝ ith. It combines in one verse the cola of Archilochus’ epodic strophe. Vesp. 248–272 has × — ⏑ — × — ⏑ — ⁝ — ⏑ — ⏑ — — ‖, 2ia ⁝ ith.^[15]

Aristophanes’ lyric metres are described on the Metres: sung tab.

Comedy shared a chorus with tragedy. In both, the chorus sang and danced to the aulos. But the comic chorus was larger, and its songs did different work.^[1] The metres of the songs are on the Metres: sung tab.

Twenty-four. The dithyramb had fifty singers and dancers, and comedy twenty-four. Tragedy had at first twelve, and later fifteen.^[2] The set piece of the comic chorus was the parabasis, in seven parts. The word means “stepping forth”: the chorus stepped forward to address the audience.^[3] We know very little of the dance and music of the comic chorus. They must have been sharply distinct from tragedy’s.^[1]

Choruses and their songs. Comic choruses play characters. Some are realistic, like the men of Acharnae, or the old men and old women of the Lysistrata. Many are fantastic, like clouds, birds and wasps. In the Birds each member represented a different bird (268–304).^[4]

Aristophanes’ lyric interludes are on the whole shorter than tragic odes. A strophe and its antistrophe are often separated by an episode, and some songs are only a few lines long. Lyric makes up 17% of the surviving plays, and less in the two plays of the fourth century.^[4] In the Assemblywomen (391) and Wealth (388) the manuscripts give only the word χοροῦ (chorou), “[song] of the chorus”, in place of some choral passages. What this marks is disputed: a dance interlude, a song not integral to the play, or odes cut or lost later.^[4]

High and low. Comic lyric runs along a spectrum, a scheme that goes back to Silk. At one end is “high” lyric, close to the style of tragedy or Pindar. At the other is “low” lyric, with everyday or vulgar words. High lyrics can pass for real cult songs, as the prayer of Thesmophoriazusae 312–330 does. The Initiates’ hymn to Iacchus in the Frogs (323–353) is “mostly ionics”, and close to the parodos of Euripides’ Bacchae. It slides from piety into jokes: the colloquial “little sandal” (σανδαλίσκον, sandaliskon), and the abuse of 416–430.^[5]

Older songs in comedy. Comic lyric quotes earlier lyric outright. A boy at the banquet in Peace sings Archilochus’ poem on the lost shield (1298–1302). The Hoopoe’s song in the Birds includes a line of Alcman (251).^[6] A lyric of the Peace (421) alludes to the opening of Stesichorus’ Oresteia. Not all the audience would have caught the allusion.^[7]

Alcaeus appears often. At the symposium in the Wasps, Philocleon adapts Alcaeus’ warning against Pittacus and turns it on Cleon (1232–1235, with Alc. 141). The Birds echoes Alcaeus 345 (1410–1411). The tragedian Agathon of the Thesmophoriazusae cites Alcaeus as a precedent for his own appearance (160–163). In a fragment someone is asked to take up and sing a skolion of Alcaeus (fr. 235 PCG).^[8] Aristophanes’ own reading may have included the Lesbian poets.^[9]

A Spartan song. The Lysistrata closes with a “Spartan” lyric. Hornblower calls it a clever and politically courageous recreation of the manner of Alcman. Taplin thinks that the play did not end with it, and that another poet wrote it for Spartans. Sommerstein objects that Aristophanes would not have called an old song a “new Muse” (1295).^[10] The point is disputed.

Poets on stage. The New Music was the style of song that innovating poets and musicians developed in the later fifth century. Aristophanes’ plays are a main source for it. In the Birds the dithyrambist Cinesias floats among the clouds in search of inspiration (1372–1409), and twice advertises his originality. In the Thesmophoriazusae Agathon wears women’s clothing to suit his characters. The Frogs mocks Euripides’ diction, metres and singing.^[11]

Older poets fare no better. A hack in the Birds offers songs “in the manner of Simonides” (916–918). The Clouds (1353–1362) makes Simonides old-fashioned. In the Peace (695–699) he is the greedy old man who would put to sea on a sieve for profit.^[12]