Greek and Latin Comedy

Braunfels’s Aristophanic opera, Die Vögel

Greek mythological comedy often entangles audiences in an interpretive double bind. While comedians often acknowledged a debt to poetic predecessors by parodying them, they, at the same time, projected an aggressive posture of innovation. This paper explores this tension between, on the one hand, revisiting a mythological tradition that traced back to Homer, and, on the other hand, emphasizing the originality of their literary endeavors.

Since Plautus in Performance (Slater 1985), scholarship on Roman Comedy has acknowledged the non-illusory style of Plautus’ plays, which maintain no firm boundary between their content and their performance context. Consequently, metatheatrical characteristics such as asides, plays-within-the-play, and overt references to performance do not “break the fourth wall” or otherwise breach the dramatic illusion, since such an illusion is absent.

Pherecrates’ comedy appears to have been remarkably different from the aggressive political and personal comedy associated with his better-known younger contemporary Aristophanes (Urios Aparisi 1997, 83-4): the anonymous On Comedy (Koster III.29-31) states that Pherecrates “stayed away from abuse (loidoria)” and “was popular for introducing novel actions and being an inventor of plots.” The titles and fragments of his comedies likewise suggest little interest in political themes (Dobrov and Urios Aparisi 1995, 150) and a predilection for innovative domestic plots (Slav

Wife-Erasure in Terence’s Hecyra