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New Testament scholars discussing irony have for decades invoked a character dynamic from Greek Old Comedy between the εἴρων and the ἀλαζών, the dissembler and the braggart, to explain the relationship between different characters in the Gospels and Paul’s letters. This article investigates the validity of this dynamic by analyzing its source: The , a 10 century manuscript that claims to summarize Aristotle’s lost work on comedy ( ). The article uses Aristotle, including , , and the , in addition to Old Comedy and Cicero to determine the likelihood that the εἴρων/ἀλαζών dynamic has its roots in Aristotelean thought and Old Comedy as described in the tractatus and argued in scholarship.

In this classic work, acclaimed Shakespeare critic C. L. Barber argues that Elizabethan seasonal festivals such as May Day and Twelfth Night are the key to understanding Shakespeare's comedies. Brilliantly interweaving anthropology, social history, and literary criticism, Barber traces the inward journey--psychological, bodily, spiritual--of the comedies: from confusion, raucous laughter, aching desire, and aggression, to harmony. Revealing the interplay between social custom and dramatic form, the book shows how the Elizabethan antithesis between everyday and holiday comes to life in the comedies' combination of seriousness and levity. \"I have been led into an exploration of the way the social form of Elizabethan holidays contributed to the dramatic form of festive comedy. To relate this drama to holiday has proved to be the most effective way to describe its character. And this historical interplay between social and artistic form has an interest of its own: we can see here, with more clarity of outline and detail than is usually possible, how art develops underlying configurations in the social life of a culture.\"--C. L. Barber, in the Introduction This new edition includes a foreword by Stephen Greenblatt, who discusses Barber's influence on later scholars and the recent critical disagreements that Barber has inspired, showing thatShakespeare's Festive Comedyis as vital today as when it was originally published.

This article bridges a gap in the study of Aristophanic humour by better demonstrating how individual jokes (in this case, the para prosdokian ‘contrary to expectation’ joke) contribute to the wider comic scenes in which they are embedded. After analysing ancient and modern explanations and examples of para prosdokian jokes, this paper introduces the concept of ‘comic bit’, a discrete unit of comedy that builds humour around a central premise, and establishes how para prosdokian jokes contribute to comic bits in a way that recent theories of para prosdokian cannot account for.

Greek comedy, especially New Comedy, contains many incidental descriptions of domestic interiors. This article argues that such descriptions constitute a valuable and overlooked source of evidence for historians of the classical Greek house; they are also of interest to literary critics in that they contribute to the thematic and conceptual meaning of the plays. The article presents and discusses all the surviving comic evidence for houses, including many previously neglected comic fragments, as well as a key scene from Menander's Samia which is more detailed than any other surviving literary depiction.

This article examines scatology in Aristophanes Assemblywomen, and argues that the play sets out to subvert comedy's normal scatological poetics. Old Comedy is usually a genre characterized by corporeal and scatological freedom. The constipation scene in Assemblywomen 311–73 is therefore highly unusual, since, while its language is scatological almost to the point of excess, it spotlights not scatological freedom but scatological obstruction. This article argues that this inversion is expressly linked to the play's reversal of gender roles as part of its ‘women on top’ plot, which is in turn conceived as a direct challenge to Old Comedy's normative poetics. The article further suggests that recognizing the Assemblywomen's less than straightforward relationship to the norms of Old Comedy may help us to reassess how, and indeed whether, we should use Aristophanes’ plays to make conjectures about the genre as a whole.

This article examines the characterization of Socrates and the socalled \"Sophists\" in Old Comedy, seeking to refine our understanding of how the comic poets portray intellectuals. I qualify the claim that they uniformly present Socrates and the Sophists as a single type of comic intellectual by considering how Socrates is consistently characterized in direct opposition to Protagoras, Prodicus, and Gorgias. I thus demonstrate the significant ways in which Socrates is presented as a ridiculous thinker of a particular kind: Protagoras, Prodicus, and Gorgias are depicted as subordinating their intellectual activity to their pursuit of tangible goods, while Socrates is an object of comedy for his complete dedication to an intellectual activity that brings him no material advantage.

In this paper, based on the baudelairian notions of “comique significatif” and “grotesque absolu”, we aim to consider the Knights under the sign of the indetermination between these two forms. In fact, while the former has often been used to construct a political reading of the Old Comedy and the latter a ritualist one, it appears to us that Aristophanes plays with the ambiguity embedded in this dichotomy. In so doing, the poet embodies in the theatrical space’s hic et nunc the topos that was emerging in this period, of the citizen as a passive spectator of politics. Indeed, while Aristophanes often points out the didactic aspect of the comedy – as in his previous play, Acharnians – and his will to open the audience’s eyes, the latter can adopt the comfortable position of the distanced spectator , laughing at its own defaults satirized on stage. Nevertheless, in Knights, the blurred line between scenic fiction and reality leads to a fictionalization of the audience and a reality of the illusion, placing the play under the sign of ambivalence rather than that of univocity. Thus, far from receiving a lesson about their political passivity, the citizens-spectators are led to question this passivity in the time and space of the theatre and the comic performance.

Examining the figure of Aesop and the traditions surrounding him, Aesopic Conversations offers a portrait of what Greek popular culture might have looked like in the ancient world. What has survived from the literary record of antiquity is almost entirely the product of an elite of birth, wealth, and education, limiting our access to a fuller range of voices from the ancient past. This book, however, explores the anonymous Life of Aesop and offers a different set of perspectives. Leslie Kurke argues that the traditions surrounding this strange text, when read with and against the works of Greek high culture, allow us to reconstruct an ongoing conversation of \"great\" and \"little\" traditions spanning centuries.

The paper offers a new approach to utopia in early and classical Greek texts from Homer to the fifth century. The model is based on four motifs regularly occurring in ‘utopian texts’, that is, descriptions of places that are distant in time and/or space. A comparative analysis of such texts (drawn from Homer, Hesiod, Pindar, Old Comedy and Herodotus) and of how they manipulate the four motifs sheds new light on specific problems (as, for example, the relevance of Herodotus’ Ethiopian episode, or the role of the myth of Perseus in Pindar's Pythian 10) and encourages more nuanced readings of famous texts, such as Homer's account of Scheria.

The purpose of this article is to explore the emergence of a strategic communication management of dissent (the so called dissent public relations) and to set its beginnings in the context of ancient Greek comedy represented by Aristophanes. Indeed, Old Comedy was the first great example of mass communication in which political satire was used to dissent and protest against political and social circumstances in fifth-century BC Athens. This situation was determined by the Peloponnesian War and its political, economic and social consequences. From this perspective, this article also constitutes an investigation into the intellectual history of public relations, of which Aristophanes can be considered one of its first practitioners.