Justin Dwyer (University of Victoria)
Erected in a corner of the Epigraphical Museum of Athens is a fragment of the Athenian Victors List preserving the names of a handful of victorious comic poets at the Athenian Lenaia (EM 8194). This fragment is remarkable because it includes within a tight grouping four of Greek New Comedy’s five canonical poets: Menander, Philemon, Diphilus, and Philippides. This would-be unbroken sequence of esteemed poets is split down the middle by an unsung Apollodorus (see 60-64, Col. IV, IG II2 2325E, Millis and Olson, 184). It is on this Apollodorus whom my paper will concentrate. Who was he? What defines his comedy? Why, despite victory against the genre’s greatest poets, is he not included among them?
Previous study of the Victors’ List, in conjunction with the relevant testimonia (e.g. Suda α 3405), confirm that the inscription’s Apollodorus was in fact Apollodorus of Gela (see Capps, 45-50; Krause, 35). Despite the poet’s unique potential as a sort of litmus test for how Hellenistic scholars separated the good poets from the great, the fragments of Apollodorus have been largely overlooked in recent discussions of the fragmentary poets (e.g. Olson 2007; Rusten; Lamari, Montanari, and Novokhatko).
Taking an integrative approach, this paper reintroduces the fragments and testimonia of Apollodorus into the discussion of Greek New Comedy and builds a composite poetic identity of the poet, offering important new insight into this direct rival of Menander and refining our understanding of the comic genre during this golden age of production.
We have roughly nine verses distributed between five fragments and eight titles that can be firmly attributed to Apollodorus. Previous scholarship on Apollodorus is limited to commentaries with restricted analysis (e.g. Meineke; Kock; Edmonds; Perez Asensio). My approach is an exercise in conjectural criticism that informs a focused, interpretative analysis of the surviving fragments (cf. Storey; Bakola). Interpretation is necessarily based on comparative analysis with better-preserved comedies of other playwrights. The discussion remains sensitive to the limitations of working with fragments (e.g. Nesselrath; Olson 2015).
The study demonstrates that Apollodorus was an active contributor to the formation of Greek New Comedy and bridged perceived shifts from so-called Middle Comedy. We see a marked interest in both tragic parody (fr. 1, titles: Pseudoaias, Sisyphus) and the banquet (fr. 2 and 4, the latter partially quoting Antiphanes directly), while potential references to a cook (fr. 2) and braggart soldier (fr. 5) indicate the incorporation of increasingly refined stock types. Apollodorus seems to have included moralizing themes into his comedies (fr. 3) and perhaps even historical figures (title: Aeschrion), both of which show engagement to some degree with his contemporary Athenian context.
Analysis of the comic fragments of Apollodorus of Gela provide a critical new perspective of Greek New Comedy at its genesis in the last quarter of the fourth century and further contributes to the decentralization of Menander in our evolving understanding of Greek comedy in the Hellenistic period.