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HISTORY
Ancient Greek Comedy
From Aristophanes to Euripides, the theatre was a central feature of Ancient Greek urban life, and comedy as a genre came to take centre stage.
By Will Street
Jul. 25, 2019, 11:30 AM
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Introduction
One of the founding features of western culture, Greek theatre attracted mass audiences to beautifully constructed outdoor locations and provided emotive entertainment that was enormously popular at the time and has proved the same with many more later generations throughout history. The city-state of Athens was the cultural centre of the art form, where theatre became institutionalised as part of a festival called Dionysia, which honoured the god, Dionysus, whose rites were intrinsically connected with the theatre.
Within Athens, three dramatic genres emerged. These were tragedy (late 500 BC), comedy (490 BC) and the satyr play. Athens, as a powerful city-state, exported the festival of Dionysia and these dramatic genres to its numerous colonies and, thus, to many Greek citizens, theatre was a central feature of their lives. While many more playwrights and plays would have existed in antiquity, the two comic playwrights whose work has survived down to the modern era include Aristophanes and Menander, whose work is labelled Old Comedy and New Comedy respectively. In the analysis below, I explored ancient Greek comedy in more detail.
The Origins of Greek Theatre
The spoken word in ancient Greek society was always intrinsic in cultural performances and society at large. The Homeric poems, first written down in 670 BC, would have been recited orally via rhapsodes for some time before they were first written down and would have continued to throughout antiquity. Constituting a medium at the heart of cultural performances, it is natural that a dramatization of oral storytelling would occur over time.
Greek tragedy as it is understood today was invented in Athens around the time of 523 BC. The famous first actor and so-called “father” of theatre is attributed to Thespis, who was said to have been the winner of the first theatrical contest held in Athens and was thus extolled as the figurehead of recitals of Homeric poems, in which performers sang and danced, in smaller events across rural Attica.
These performances across rural Attica evolved into narrative-like ballads, that eventually later formed into drama. That said, Thepsis is only the most famous originator of Greek drama. Alternatively, the statesman, Solon, is credited with developing poems in which characters spoke with their own voice. Nonetheless, Thepsis holds on to his title as the legendary founder of Greek drama today, with performers in English, for instance, commonly being termed as “thespian.”
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The Athenians instituted a festival within the city of Athens called Dionysia, which devised a competition between a number of plays, all being of the tragedy genre at the time. As a means to bring communities together and provide entertainment, it is likely that an important reason this was enacted was to ensure the loyalty of the tribes of Attica.
The festival was first initiated roughly around 508 BC, however no drama texts have survived from this period. Despite this, beside Thepsis, three of the names of the competitors are known. These three bear the titles Choerilus, Pratinas and Phrynichus and are believed to have been competitors in the early Dionysia competitions.
Today, only a very small numbers of the plays that would have been performed in antiquity have survived down to the modern era. Although naturally the survival of ancient texts does rely upon later generation’s transcription, there was an important ancient reason. This was that, until the Hellenistic period, all plays were unique pieces of work written in honour of Dionysus and only performed once. Therefore, only the works that were memorable, successful and deemed worthy by librarians enough that, when the repetition of old drama became fashionable during the Hellenistic period, did they come to ever be written up formally.
Theatres and Costumes
As most ancient Greek settlements were situated on top of hills, the majority of theatres were naturally built into the side of a hill to provide elevated seating. Alternatively, if there was no suitable hill, a mound was built up. In front of the seating, there was a circular performance space where the play would be carried out. Behind that, there was a usually a tall, arched entranceway to the stage and, by 465 BC, in some instances theatres began constructing a scenic wall, or skênê behind the stage.
Within the plays that were enacted, the common practice was for actors to wear masks. The ancient Greek term for a mask is prosopon (literally “mask”) and they were an important constituent of the worship of Dionysus at Athens, being most probably used in ceremonial rites and celebrations.
The evidence, however, for our knowledge of how masks were used is only minimal. There are a few vase paintings from the 5th Century BC. One, for instance, shows a mask suspended from a tree, while the Pronomos vase shows masks alongside actors preparing for a satyr play. However, no physical evidence remains of any masks as the objects were made out of organic materials and not considered permanent items. Their fate would commonly be their dedication by whichever owner they had to Dionysus at his altar once the play had come to an end.
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The remaining vase paintings of masks from the 5th Century BC depict masks as helmet-like objects that covered the whole head and face with apertures for the eyes and mouth and a wig for hair. The masks were most probably made out of stiffened linen, leather, wood or cork, while the wig probably consisted of human or animal hair. Considering the visual capacity was somewhat limited by the masks, it would have been important that the actor hear sufficiently and thus it is likely that the mask omitted the ears, which, we can presume, were instead covered with hair.
These masks opened the door for single actors to play multiple characters and an all-male cast to play female roles. The expressive and macabre images on the masks would have created an electrifying and poignant impression on the spectators, and thus the masks, which were the iconic convention of classical Greek drama, would have created an emotive spectacle. With multiple characters but only two or three on stage at one time, their appearance would also have been crucial to how the audience discern the gender, age and demographics of each character.
Aristophanes and Old Comedy
Born in 446 BC, Aristophanes was an audacious and daring comic playwright. As an initially precocious writer, who authored the play Banqueters, in 427 BC, when he was only at the age of 19, Aristophanes came of age at a time when the atmosphere in Athens was particularly febrile. Coinciding somewhat feverously at the time was the Peloponnesian War that still raged across much of Greece, the Athenian statesmen, Pericles, dying only just beforehand and a plague that was ravaging across Attica.
Nonetheless, Aristophanes did not shy away from unleashing his acerbic wit on the political life and personalities of Athenian society. In 426 BC, his second play, Babylonians, won first prize at the City Dionysia and induced by its poignant quips the wrath of the demagogue Cleon. He claimed offence by its unpatriotic sentiments, although Cleon was, evidently, the butt of Aristophanes’ mordant satire.
Unperturbed by this antipathy, Aristophanes continued to lampoon Cleon in later works. For instance in Knights (424 BC), Cleon is represented in a seditious Paphlagonian slave who adulates his master, Demos (“the People”), for his own gains. The play was performed at the City Dionysia notwithstanding Cleon’s recent victory at Pylos in the Peloponnesian War.
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Through his other early works, he criticised Athenian policy in the Peloponnesian War. For instance, in Lysistrata (411 BC), at a time when Persia was beginning to take an offensive interest in Greece, which was in part due to the Athenian statesman, Alcibiades’, recent intervention at the court of the Persian statesman, Tissaphernes, Aristophanes chose to ridicule Alcibiades and urged the poleis of Greece to put aside their differences. Similarly, in Frogs (405 BC), he preached for a return to old-fashioned values via reference to the tragedian, Aeschylus, and by extension Pericles.
However, with the defeat of Athens in the Peloponnesian War, Aristophanes shifted his topics away from political ridicule towards social mores rather than individuals. He adopted a new form of comedy, moving away from acerbic bite, towards a genre of situation comedy, exemplified in the play Plutus in 388 BC.
Ultimately, Aristophanes achieved little difference on the running of Athenian politics yet offered a style of comedy that ridiculed Athenian political life, albeit in the theatre. Cleon was, for instance, appointed strategos shortly after being satirized in Knights and his appeal to end the Peloponnesian War had little impact. However, central to his plays was the use of absurdity and fantasy to denounce politicians, jurors, sophists (including Socrates) that would have created an acerbic and witty cadre but also ensure that he refrained from straying so far as to incur an individual’s wrath.
To today’s audience, Aristophanes’ plays may seem in part misogynistic and xenophobic. Scatology and obscenity were also a feature, which ensured the works were unpublished in English translation until the mid-twentieth century AD. However, the weight of Aristophanes’ contemporary literary might can be gathered from Plato’s Symposium, where Plato aims to reconcile Socrates and Aristophanes after Aristophanes’ satirizing of Socrates in Clouds.
Thus, the period of Old Comedy as we know it today was characterized as revolving around pungent political satire and involving an abundance of sexual and scatological innuendo. The genre disguised political attack as buffoonery, a technique that was picked up extensively again by later European writers such as Rabelais and Voltaire.
Menander and New Comedy
Emerging after the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC, New Comedy built upon the legacy of its predecessors, however shifted the topics away from public affairs to everyday life. It’s prominent playwright, Menander, a selection of whose work survives today, came of age just after the death of Alexander the Great, entering his first comedy, Anger, in the Athenian festival, the Lenaea, in 321 BC at the age of 21. Menander’s works exemplify the more relaxed approach to comedy that revolved around everyday happenings, which typified the New Comedy period.
Six years later, Menander devised one of his most famous works, Dyskolos (Grumpy Old Man), that imagined a rich urban Athenian falling in love with and marrying a country girl despite the reproachful behaviour of her father, the “grumpy old man” to which the title refers to. The play won first prize at the Lenaea, however Menander would go to enjoy even greater success, winning the City Dionysia a total of eight times.
Where fifth century participatory democracy had opened the door for comedians to present hard-hitting political satires, (while avoiding impunity the bulk of the time) that lampooned prominent figures on the stage, the defeat of Athens in 404 BC required a gentler approach. Instead of the political buffoonery, stories of romantic love dominated, and revolved around domestic life, often in a rural setting, finishing at the end commonly with a happy ending.
What is noticeable from Menander’s works is the sheer escapism that he provides. He makes no mention of the seven-year famine that beset the Mediterranean in the 320s, the wars of Alexander the Great’s successors, Greece’s 20,000 displaced refugees or the reforms of his friend, Demetrius of Phalerum. Soothing the worries of his audience instead, Tyche (fate) appears recurringly in his various plots.
Nonetheless, Menander would go on to have a noticeable influence on later Roman writers. Quintilian, for instance, praised his reflection of real life, creativity and refined style. St. Paul would even borrow his phrase “bad company corrupts good character.” He became, like his prominence in Athens, essential reading to the Romans.
New Comedy was, therefore, a genre that depicted Athenian society and social morality of the period, approaching it favourably yet offering no attempt to criticize or improve it. It was rustic form of comedy, involving the foibles of stock-characters as they went about their ordinary lives. Pervading Roman society through Horace, Plautus and Terence, New Comedy would be picked up later by William Shakespeare and France’s Moliére among others. The genre’s romantic situation comedy brand would even be copied by recent Hollywood films such as Meet the Parents in 2000 and Meet the Fockers in 2004.
Conclusion
Providing humorous and satirical drama would always be a natural outcome of a theatrical world. The Athenians’ first works of drama were tragedy, however Aristophanes’ and others’ works in the 5th Century BC ensured comedy became a substantial genre. It began, through Aristophanes and others, with poignant political satire and acerbic wit through tropes of buffoonery and fantasy. By the time of New Comedy, with tumultuous times pervading Athens, comedy had developed into a pastoral form of situation comedy that ridiculed ordinary life occurrences. Spreading into the works of Horace, Terence and Plautus, ancient Athenian comedy would transpire through ancient Roman society right up to the Hollywood films of the modern era and other cultural works. It was, as the Athenians’ City Dionysia suggested, a witty and comical way to showcase the dramatic arts.