II Old Comedy and Aristophanes

Extract

Although the competition for comedies at the Athenian City Dionysia was made official in 486, the genre itself is certainly older, probably by generations. In this much-discussed passage from the Poetics, Aristotle complains that his research into the early history of Attic drama was hampered in the case of comedy by a shortage of documentation, making it impossible to construct the kind of developmental history that he was able to piece together for tragedy. Only with the generation of Crates, whose career began around 450, did a clear sequence of innovation start to become traceable, and for the earlier period Aristotle himself seems to have been driven back on what would have appeared to him a plausible inference: that comedy had evolved in the same way as tragedy, from a pre-dramatic mode of performance through the separation of chorus and soloist. He saw a credible ancestor in the phallic songs’ performed at Dionysiac festivals around Attica, such as the one staged in Acharnians (237 ff.), and suggested that the lead voice in such processional songs (taken by Dicaeopolis in the Acharnians scene) was the origin of the comic solo actor.