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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2016
Aristophanes, the last — and greatest — poet of Old Comedy, is Europe’s first — and greatest — comic playwright. The verdict is time’s, unless it is mere accident that his plays alone survive into our era. He was not, it is true, invariably successful in his lifetime, and Aristotle’s somewhat jaundiced view of comedy did not assist his reputation later. Yet appreciative if not always fully comprehending readers have in every age responded to his χάρις. It was, we may suppose, this indefinable attractiveness that was ultimately lacking in his rivals: Alexandria classified him in a ‘triad’ or ‘big three’ with Eupolis and the bibulous Kratinos, Eustathios refers to him, unnamed and unaccompanied, as òκωμικός, ‘the comic poet’.
Books listed in the Select Bibliography are cited either by author’s name alone or (in case of ambiguity) by author’s name and abbreviated title.
1. Aristot. E.N. 1128a 15, 17 ff.;pol. 1336b 3ff., 14; Rh. 1419b 8. See further below, p. 41.
2. Demetr. Eloc. 150, 152, 161; cf. Plato (?) fr. 14D, A.P. 9. 186.
3. Hor. Sat. I. 4. ‘Eupolis atque Cratinus Aristophanesque poetae | atque alii quorum comoedia prisca virorum est.’
4. Miller, Harold W., ‘A note on ό κωμικός in Eustathius’, TAPhA 73 (1942), 353-7Google Scholar.
5. 486 B.C. See l.G. ii2. 2325, Suda s.v. Χιωυίδης.
6. K.520 ff., Magnes, Kratinos (cf. F. 357), Konnos, Krates; F. 13 ff., Phrynichos, Lykos, Ameipsias. See also below, p. 4.
7. W. 57. Cf. 1015 ff.; C. 537 ff.; P. 739 ff.
8. C. 547; E. 584.
9. W. 1535 ff.
10. Vita 25 ( Dübner, F., Scholia Graeca in Aristophanem (Paris, 1842)Google Scholar, Prolegomena, p. XII). On the use of Aristophanes as an historical source see de Ste. Croix, G.E.M., The Origins of the Peloponnesian War (London, 1972), pp. 232–4 Google Scholar.
11. See, for these, B.A. Sparkes, ‘The Greek Kitchen’, JHS 82 (1962), 121-37 and ‘The Greek Kitchen: Addenda’, ibid., 84 ( 1964), 162-3; B.A. Sparkes and Lucy Talco«, Pots and Pans of Classical Athens, Agora Picture Books I (Princeton, 1958). For the interest of such studies for Aristophanic scholarship see Sparkes, ‘Illustrating Aristophanes’, JHS 95 (1975), 123-35.
12. The Challenge of the Greek (Cambridge, 1943), p.25.
13. A notable exception, in comedy, was Frogs (Hypothesis I. 32, III. 17).
14. ‘One misses the largeness of Aristophanes unless one appreciates his gift for self-contradiction’, Whitman, p. 24.