Old Comedy

On the fifth-century Athenian comic stage, subtlety and innovation were terms of both praise and abuse. Aristophanes criticizes his rival Crates for ‘ultra-urbane plot conceits’ (Eq. 539 ἀστειοτάτας ἐπινοίας), and is himself derided by Cratinus as an ‘oversubtle’ heckler in the audience (fr. 342 ὑπολεπτολόγος). Elsewhere, Aristophanes complains that his Clouds failed precisely because its ‘great newness … of conception’ (Vesp. 1044 καινοτάτας . . . διανοίας), and that only true connoisseurs within the audience had appreciated its genius.

In his Kolakes (“Spongers”), Eupolis (c. 446-411 BCE) describes Cecrops as “human as far down as the crotch, then a tunny-fish from there on down” (F 159). This peculiar portrayal of the first king of Athens differs radically from the enduring convention depicting theriomorphic Cecrops as a serpent-legged creature (Gantz 1993; Kron 1976).

The relationship between politics and Aristophanic comedy has been a matter of debate. On the one hand, some scholars have ascribed to Aristophanes’ oeuvre a politically neutral outlook, arguing that references to contemporary politics were a convention of genre and that comedy had no real-life impact (Gomme 1938; Rosen 1988; Olson 2010). On the other hand, there have been arguments for a partisan outlook, which in turn was analyzed as either a conservative and anti-democratic (de Ste.

The significance of the frog chorus in Aristophanes’ Frogs has long been a source of debate. For example, some scholars have viewed the frogs as symbolic of comedy’s low register (Reckford, Hubbard, Biles); some suggest that the agōn between Dionysus and the frogs prefigures that between Aeschylus and Euripides by offering a critique of the frogs’ musical abilities (Defradas, Worman); and one especially ingenious interpretation analyzes the amphibians as a parody of Aristophanes’ rival at the Lenaea of 405 BCE, Phrynichus Comicus (Demand).