Description: Introduction Ralph M. Rosen The plays of Aristophanes collected in these volumes, composed and performed in Athens during the fifth and fourth centuries BC, are the earliest surviving record of comic drama in Western culture. Like its contemporary and cognate form tragedy, Attic comedy seems to appear suddenly as a fully-formed and remarkably complex poetic genre, paradoxically wedded to its own cultural moment yet profoundly resonant for audiences and readers up to our own time. Indeed, the seeds of Gilbert and Sullivan, the Marx Brothers, or Monty Python''s Flying Circus are readily apparent in Aristophanes and can easily lead one to assume that not much has changed in comedy since antiquity. Yet the comic drama of fifth-century Athens, known as Old Comedy, was the product of a long and complex process of literary and cultural interactions and displays as many idiosyncrasies of its own age as it does links to later traditions. Behind the sprightly, colloquial translations featured in this series lie a richly varied Greek verse form and, as the following pages will show, a comic aesthetic by turns alien and familiar to our own sensibilities. Twice a year during the fifth century the Athenians would gather together to honor Dionysus, god of wine and revelry. The largest and most extravagant occurred in early spring, toward the end of March, and was known as the Great Dionysia, or City Dionysia, to distinguish it from so-called rural Dionysia, which were celebrated on a lesser scale throughout the Attic countryside. The other festival was known as the Lenaean Dionysia (named after the Lenaion sanctuary where it was held), a more limited, domestic affair that took place in January-February. Various activities occurred at these festivals, including processions, sacrifices, and musical competitions, but the central event at each was the performance of tragedy and comedy. Great expense and effort was lavished on these dramatic performances, as poets and actors competed for prizes awarded by a panel of judges drawn from ten tribes of Attica. Tragedy and comedy were so much a part of a formal state event that the entire Athenian citizenry might, in principle, attend the performances. The Theater of Dionysus itself on the Athenian acropolis was capable evidently of holding about 17,000 spectators. The Lenaean Dionysia was a smaller and less prestigious affair than the City Dionysia, and theatrical performances were formalized there rather late in the century (about 440 BC). Even so, the Lenaea was as public an event as the City Dionysia, and the plots of Lenaean tragedy and comedy likewise reflect the poets'' awareness that they were composing before the entire "national" community. Drawing on a rich store of inherited myths and plots, the most skillful tragic poets crafted plays that could address issues central to Athenian political and social ideology--the relationship between rulers and their subjects, the nature of democracy, the interaction of man and woman, to name a few--and the result was that characteristically "tragic" blend of timeliness and universalizing. Greek comedy evolved alongside tragedy at the festival competitions and became equally implicated in its own historical moment but, unlike tragedy, it was not constrained to work with mythological material, nor did it need to preserve a consistent and unbroken dramatic illusion. The comic poet was relatively free to invent plots out of whole cloth, and his imagination was limited only by his sense of what the audience would find acceptable. Further, although it shared with tragedy basic compositional units, namely the alternation of spoken "episodes" with choral song and dance, comic diction was far less formal and stylized than that of tragedy. Old Comedy, therefore, could reflect the contemporary cultural climate much more directly than tragedy: not only could the poet allude to current events or famous people through allegory or analogy but he could even name names, express indignation, and claim a personal authority (however disingenuously) to a degree wholly unavailable to his colleagues in tragedy. The license afforded Attic comedy in the composition of plots and choice of language has a history that extends well beyond its institutionalization at the Dionysian festivals of fifth-century Athens. The exact origins of Attic comedy are difficult to trace, but the word komoidia itself, from which "comedy" derives, offers a useful starting point. Komoidia means a komos-song, where the komos refers to a group of men, often costumed, who entertained audiences with song and dance at various festive occasions. Modern analogues to the ancient komos are likely to be found in the activities of Mummers, still common in certain European and American holiday celebrations. Like Mummers, komos-singers (komoidoi) performed interactively with an audience, often humorously cajoling and mocking individuals with attitudes and language that in normal circumstances would be disruptive and transgressive. Little is known about how and when komoi actually became comic drama, formally performed before a passive audience, but the most fundamental vestige of the komoi in Attic comedy can be seen in the humorously antagonistic relationships so common between individual characters and groups of characters, and between poet and audience. Fifth-century comic drama preserves some of the carnivalesque spirit of the komos, which rendered vituperation and satirical commentary innocuous by means of humor, irony, and a basic assumption that comic speech was ultimately fictive, no matter how "real" it pretended to be in performance. Indeed, perhaps the central dynamic of Aristophanic comedy is precisely the tension that arises between the poet''s voice, with its didactic claims and autobiographical pretenses, and the fictional demands of the genre itself. Did Aristophanes write the Clouds, which satirizes Socrates and his followers, because he had a genuine personal animus against him, or because he was an eccentric, funny-looking man who would make a great comic spectacle? Or did the poet exploit the comic potential of Socrates, not because he had anything against him personally, but because he wanted to use him to register his own sincere criticism of current philosophical trends? That seems reasonable until one notes that the play itself offers very little in the way of philosophical consistency: traditional "philosophy,"which the play ostensibly endorses, ends up as comically ridiculous as the newfangled, sophistic ways which it claims to repudiate through its satirizing of Socrates. We face a similar dilemma in assessing Aristophanes'' relationship with his other famous target, the demagogic politician Cleon, who is relentlessly, often violently, mocked in Knights, and mentioned with disdain at least somewhere in nearly all his fifth-century plays. Aristophanes even alludes to an actual personal feud with Cleon, a feud that supposedly began when Cleon attempted to prosecute the poet for publicly ridiculing Athenian politicians in his (now lost) play of 426 BC, Babylonians. Aristophanes was very convincing: ancient commentators spoke of the feud as if it were a documented historical fact, and modern critics have followed suit, even though our only evidence ultimately comes from the comedies themselves, which have a generic obligation to create personal animosities between the poet and a target. We will probably never know for sure whether Aristophanes truly feuded with Cleon, but the question of historicity is ultimately less significant than the ways in which the comic poet persistently exploited the topos throughout his plays. For through the relationship with Cleon as it was developed on the stage over several plays spanning at least five years-Acharnians (425 BC), Knights (424 BC), Clouds (423 BC), Wasps (422 BC), and Peace (421 BC)- Aristophanes could dramatize with brilliant economy the ethos of boisterous confrontation and antagonism that fueled so many plays of Attic comedy. Any literature in which an author adopts a stance of moral indignation and undeserved beleaguerment, and engages in invective or personal mockery, makes it especially difficult for the audience to separate fiction from reality, if only because the author works hard to enlist their sympathies for his allegedly urgent and topical predicament. Yet despite this implied bond with an audience in opposition to a target, a group or even an issue, we never witness the poet''s voice directly in any of Aristophanes'' plays (Dicaeopolis in Acharnians, is about as close as we get to this). No character ever explicitly represents the poet himself, and the poet''s name is never directly mentioned. Instead, Aristophanes avails himself of a structural device known as the parabasis, which had become the conventional place in Old Comedy, where the poet could interrupt the flow of episodes and make personal claims through the mouthpiece of the chorus. The parabasis, which comes from the verb parabaino, "to step aside," was essentially a digression, a temporary halt in the main action while the chorus came forward to address the audience. Its location in the play was not rigidly fixed but tended to occur toward the middle of the play, often functioning as a kind of entr''acte. In its most elaborate form-as we see, for example, in Wasps-the parabasis consists of a prolonged exchange between the chorus and their leader, alternating spoken and sung verse, in which the chorus-leader actually speaks on behalf of the poet. Through the chorus-leader, then, Aristophanes could take up any number of topics, including current events, the superiority of his comedy over that of his rivals, indignation at the audience for lack of support, and, of course, abuse against "personal enemies" such as Cleon. The parabasis is our main source for "autobiographical" informatio

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