The theatrical component of Ancient Greece

Greek theater had two major genres, tragedy and comedy. There was also a third subcategory, satyr plays, which were performed between the acts in tragedies, making fun of the characters. Athenian and later Greek comedies can be divided into three periods: Old, Middle, and New. Old Comedy began around 450 until around 400; Middle Comedy ran from 400 until the death of Alexander the Great in 323, and the New Comedy was from 323 to 250, during the Hellenistic Age.

These divisions were established during the Hellenistic Age, perhaps formulated by Aristophanes of Byzantium (257-180), the head librarian at the Library of Alexandria, who devised numerous grammatical systems to create a system similar to punctuation. This division seems to be purely arbitrary, since comedy existed from early times and continuously changed and evolved over time. There were a variety of comedies based upon local customs and traditions. The most famous of these were created in Athens around 425 by Aristophanes.

During the rise of Athens, comedy performances presented parodies of and attacks on political leaders. The Old Comedy had a stylized and structured system. The play started with the reading of the prologue, which described the background for the events that would soon unfold on stage and often served as a preface to the act that followed. This was then followed by the paodos, the first song sung by the chorus as it entered from both sides of the stage, and the debate (agon), a fight between the two main characters and/or their supporters in the chorus.

This was the heart of the play, whether comedy or tragedy. A peculiar element of the Old Comedy was the parabasis, where the actors leave the stage and the chorus addresses the crowd about a topic irrelevant to the play. It may have been meant to be a break in the play that would provide the author with the ability to talk about something else—almost like a political commercial or a press release about the author. Comedies were not staged at the festivals until about 487, after the Battle of Marathon and about a generation after the establishment of tragedies at the festivals.

By 450, these Old Comedy plays led by the chorus had taken on their final form and were best exemplified by Cratinus, who won numerous prizes at Athens in the Great or City Dionysia, a large festival in Athens established by Pisistratus in the sixth century and held in March or April. Cratinus wrote twenty-one comedies, at least eight of which won at the City Dionysia. He was known for attacking Pericles and was lampooned by Aristophanes in his play The Knights as an old coot, past his prime, trying to get a drink; the next year, Cratinus, then in his nineties, wrote the Pytine (The wine flask), which defeated Aristophanes’s The Clouds at the festival—a triumph that was probably very satisfying to him.

Pericles seemed to be a particular target in these early comedies. One playwright, Hermippus, who like Cratinus was older than Aristophanes and his contemporary Eupolis, wrote the play Moirai, which portrayed Pericles as a coward and bully who was always drinking, and accused Pericles’s mistress, Aspasia, of impiety and immorality. She was in fact put on trial for these transgressions, and only Pericles’s tears got her off. These incidents likely provided material for the comics. Eupolis, a bit younger than Aristophanes and at first his friend, also attacked Pericles and Aspasia, probably in 429. His style seemed to be more elegant than Aristophanes. The two playwrights had a falling out with each other around 423, with each accusing the other of copying him.

Aristophanes, due to the survival of his plays, is the best-known comedic playwright. Although facts about his life are sketchy, he was born about 446, when Athens was at its highest point, and he lived during the Peloponnesian War, dying in 386 after the Peloponnesian War. As a poet of the Old Comedy, he epitomized its style and structure. His plays offer an excellent portrayal of life in Athens and the political strains during the Peloponnesian War.

His works are the major corpus of Old Comedy, and eleven of his forty plays (thirty-five of which were unique with five being duplicates) have survived. He was able to use his powers of speech to ridicule the political life of Athens. He poked fun at such individuals as Socrates in The Clouds and Cleon in The Knights. His plays are pro-Athens, and they attack individuals such as the politician Cleon for leading Athens astray and profiting from the war.

An examination of the surviving plays by Aristophanes shows how he interacted with Athenians and how Athens shaped his political thoughts. His first two known plays, The Banqueters (427), which glorified the older generation of victors at Marathon, and The Babylonians (426), which Cleon said was slanderous, are unfortunately lost. His first surviving play, The Acharnians, was produced in 425 and won first prize at the Lenaia festival; it concerns an absurd plot about a young man who obtains a private peace agreement, something impossible, with Sparta during the Peloponnesian War and enjoys the fruits of that treaty while the rest of Athens suffers. His fourth play, The Knights (424), focused on attacking Cleon, probably in revenge for the populist’s criticism of The Babylonians. In this play, Cleon is the villain, and the people of Athens triumph over him.

After The Farmers (424), he wrote The Merchant Ships (423) and the first version of The Clouds; unfortunately, all of these are lost, although The Clouds survives in an incomplete version from around 415. In this latter work, Socrates is lampooned, and it does not contain the political satire of his other early plays. Plato argued that the Clouds caused Socrates to be indicted and found guilty, although the twenty-year interval between its first production and Socrates’s trial argues against that. At any rate, the play was not well received.

Aristophanes’s fourth surviving play, The Wasps (422), continued his attack on Cleon, as well as the law courts (because Cleon, at the height of his powers, was using the courts to further his political ambitions). The play won second prize at the Lenaia. In the same year, he produced Proagon. His play Peace, was written in 421, just before the Peace of Nicias was ratified, and it launched yet another attack on the pro-war leader Cleon (even though he had died a few months earlier). The play, which won second prize in the Dionysia, shows how the peace treaty was not necessarily the best, and opportunities were lost.

An interval of seven years existed between this play and his next two, Amphi- araus (414), which was lost, and The Birds (414), his sixth surviving play. The latter took second prize at the Dionysia. Interestingly, this fantasy play, which was staged just as the Sicilian expedition was launched, does not contain references to the war, but rather the restoration of Athens as a great city.

In 411, his seventh surviving play, Lysistrata, was produced. Many argue that its plot, the withholding of sex by the women of Greece until peace is achieved, is an antiwar play. Others, however, see it as the opposite—a satire on the peace party for supposing that peace could be obtained at any cost. It was produced at the same time as Thesmophoriazusae, Aristophanes’s eighth surviving play, it features subversive women, parodies on playwrights such as Euripides, one of the main characters, and the normal Athenian, all of whom who have debased themselves.

Like some of his recent plays, it does not talk about the war. In this work, Aristophanes moves away from the Old Comedy structure. Plutus (408), largely lost (although its final version from 388 is extant), a comedy about wealth and morality, moved even further toward New Comedy. This play makes clear that riches are not for the virtuous; instead, they come to people randomly, and anyone can have wealth if they are lucky. Countering this sentiment is the idea that without poverty, there would be no trade or enterprise because everyone would have everything they need. Another lost play, Gerytades, was produced before the end of the war in 407.

Aristophanes’s ninth surviving play is The Frogs (405), which won first place at the Lenaia. The comedy, written at the end of the Peloponnesian War, presents an attempt to show that Athens will be restored, just as Aeschylus (who had died earlier in about 456), returns with the god Dionysus to help Athens. The next dated play from Aristophanes is The Assemblywomen (391), his tenth surviving work. Once again, he portrays women in control of the government, eliminating private wealth and enforcing sexual equality for all. Like all of his plays, Aristophanes is not promoting these ideas but rather making fun of the current Athenian government—and in particular, questioning whether Athens would embark on a new set of wars to regain its empire, espoused by the poor, or peace, espoused by the wealthy. The play forms the link between Old Comedy and the upcoming New Comedy and has been seen as part of Middle Comedy.

His last surviving play, Wealth (388), was a reworking of an earlier play. Two further dated plays, Cocalius (387) and Aiolosicon (386), do not survive. Other poems do not survive either, and they are undated and probably fill in the gap of the time periods missing. Of these, fifteen were unique, while three were earlier or later versions of some of his plays. Aristophanes’s plays show evolution and change during his time and into the Middle Comedy period.

Within a century of Aristophanes’s time, the New Comedy took hold. Unlike the Old Comedy of Aristophanes, which made fun of and satirized the politics of the day in an attempt to teach people about important issues, the New Comedy became more like the situation comedies of today. No longer were politicians lampooned, which under a king would be dangerous; instead, individuals would get into strange situations and get out of them through events presented in a farcical manner. Menander is perhaps the best-known comic, and his comedies and other works were used as examples by writers such as Plautus in Rome.