SCS-69: Ancient Comedy and Comic Traditions

Performed across the ancient Mediterranean in a variety of contexts from at least the classical period onward, mime was a flexible dramatic form that was not associated with any one time or place in the way that, for example, tragedy was associated with Classical Athens. Specific mimes, however, could be rooted in their place of origin, particularly those written by the Sicilian mime writer Sophron in the 5^th century BCE. As J.H.

Aristophanes Wasps 1197-1264, which describes Bdelycleon teaching his father Philocleon how to comport himself in a high-society symposion, is prominent in sympotic scholarship (e.g. Vetta 1983; Cooper and Morris 1990: 77-78; Murray 1990a: 150, 2018 [1991]: 302, 2003: 17; Dalby 1996: 14; Bowie 1997: 10; Fisher 2000: 356-357; Steiner 2002: 351; Collins 2004: 99-110; Węcowski 2014: 90), though there is not consensus on the passage’s significance.

In this paper, I argue that Knemon, the main character of Menander’s Dyskolos, is disabled; I examine his characterization in the play by reading him alongside tragic figures with disabilities (Oedipus, Philoctetes) and other prominent disabled figures in Greek literature (Hephaestus, the Euripidean Cyclops) in order to better understand the role of disability in ancient comedy. Before Act IV begins, Knemon falls into a well, and this incident ultimately inspires his conversion and resolves the main conflicts of the play.

This paper explores the dynamics of appetite in Aristophanes’ Wasps, arguing that the play frames Athenian democracy as a system driven by the political force of hunger. The play’s plot hinges on the connection between political participation and appetite: by serving on juries, the old men of Athens who make up the play’s chorus are compensated with money to buy food and drink.

This presentation reports the collated data of a newly completed survey of the prosodic shapes of all the words in all the iambic trimeters and trochaic tretrameters in all the complete plays of Plautus and Terence. These data reveal, quantitatively and qualitatively, the extent to which meter served as a promotional agent not only of word selection but of clause building in palliate composition.

Alcmena and Sosia of Plautus’ Amphitruo both become targets of psychological manipulation as they are gradually pressured to accept narratives that they know to be untrue. In a play famously about doubles (Dupont 1998, Christenson 2000), I treat Sosia’s perpetuation of the psychological abuse he endures as a foil to Alcmena’s unwavering rejection of similar treatment.