Comedy and Comic Receptions

In his biography of Polemon of Athens, the head of the Academy from 313 to 269, Diogenes Laertius comments on Polemon’s fondness for Sophocles (4.19-20):

He also loved Sophocles, particularly in those passages where it seemed as if, in the words of the comic poet, ‘a Molossian dog co-authored’ ( κύων τις ἐδόκει συμποιεῖν Μολοττικός) his plays with him, and where the poet was, according to Phrynicus, ‘neither bland nor doctored but Pramnian’ (οὐ γλύξις οὐδ' ὑπόχυτος, ἀλλὰ Πράμνιος). Thus he would call Homer the epic Sophocles and Sophocles the tragic Homer.

This presentation intends to analyze Alfonso Sastre's Los dioses y los cuernos ("The gods and the cuckolds") as a special reception of Plautus' Amphitruo, focusing on his use of metatheater, anachronisms, literary allusions (many of them to the Latin text itself), comic and literary stage directions and modern elements of performance as a way of recreating Plautine metatheater in a postmodern context.

Terence’s prologues have been studied as sources not only for Roman theater (Dér; Garton) but also for early rhetoric (Barsby 2007; Goldberg 1983; Victor). Most studies take at face value the narrative of a young playwright harried by critics. Recent scholarship argues that each prologue is linked to its respective plot (Caston; Germany; Gowers), but these subtle readings are possible only when the play can be studied as text: such correspondence is unlikely to be perceived in performance.

Lucretius’s allusions to Roman comedy in DRN 4 have so far mostly been interpreted within the context of the Epicurean’s discussion of love and sex. Here, Lucretius rejects the palliata’s overly self-indulgent emotionality. I will argue that in fact, Lucretius’s allusions to comedy also inform his wider argument about Epicurean physics. Throughout Book 4, we can detect scattered additional references to the stage.

While scholars have noted that Euripides’ Helen is indebted to epic (Homer) and lyric (Stesichorus), I suggest that an additional model for the play comes from the unlikely source of comedy, Aristophanes’ Acharnians, and that when Euripides incorporates the very tropes that Aristophanes had parodied in Acharnians into Helen, he is engaging in a dialogue with Aristophanes concerning the appropriate use and effectiveness of dramatic costuming.

This paper studies Aristophanes’ use of the rare term mormolukeia to signify dramatic masks in two fragments:

31 K-A: ἀφ’ οὗ κωμῳδικὸν μορμολυκεῖον ἔγνων,
“Ever since I knew the comedic mormolukeion…”

130 K-A: {A} τίς ἂν φράσειε ποῦ ’στι τὸ Διονύσιον;
{Β} ὅπου τὰ μορμολυκεῖα προσκρέμαται, γύναι,
“{A} Who can tell me where the precinct of Dionysus is?
{B} Where the mormolukeia are hung-up, woman.”