Ancient Greek comedy
Ancient Greek comedy was born alongside tragedy as one of the three great dramatic forms of classical Greece, and it carried a deceptively serious job: to make an audience laugh at themselves. The philosopher Aristotle, writing around 335 BC in his Poetics, defined comedy as a representation of laughable people involving some kind of blunder or ugliness that does not cause pain or disaster. That definition, spare as it sounds, points toward something lasting. The exaggerated character archetypes that ancient Greek comic poets perfected are, in fact, the direct origin of what we still call a comedy character today.
Athenian comedy is divided into three distinct periods, each shaped by the politics and tastes of its era. Old Comedy survives mainly through eleven plays by a single poet named Aristophanes, born around 446 BC. Middle Comedy is almost entirely lost, preserved in fragments scattered across later authors. New Comedy, which flourished after the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC, is known primarily through the papyrus fragments of a writer named Menander. Between those poles stretches roughly three centuries of comic theater, and the questions worth holding onto are these: how did comedy change as Athens changed, why did Menander in particular cast such a long shadow over Western literature, and what does it mean that so much of the oldest surviving humor is also some of the most politically barbed writing in the ancient world?
Aristophanes is the reason we know anything substantial about Old Comedy at all. His eleven surviving plays are the primary record of a form practiced by a large number of comic poets working in Athens in the late 5th century BC. His most significant contemporary rivals were Hermippus and Eupolis, but their works have not survived intact. Aristophanes was born around 446 BC and won more than twelve victories in comic competitions between 427 BC and 388 BC.
What made his work distinctive was its willingness to go after targets directly. Aristophanes lampooned the most important personalities and institutions of his day. His portrayal of Socrates in The Clouds is openly buffoonish, rendering the philosopher as a comical figure of ridicule. His play Lysistrata is a racy anti-war farce. That combination of pungent political satire with an abundance of sexual and scatological humor effectively defined the genre for later readers.
Old Comedy's influence did not stay inside Athens. Later European writers including Rabelais, Cervantes, Swift, and Voltaire drew on this tradition. What they borrowed specifically was a technique: the practice of wrapping a political attack inside the protective shell of buffoonery. That layer of theatrical disguise allowed satirists to say things that plain argument might not have survived.
Earlier in the tradition, even before Aristophanes shaped what Old Comedy would become, figures such as Susarion of Megara were active around 580 BC, and Epicharmus of Kos flourished somewhere between roughly 540 and 450 BC. Cratinus, who lived from 519 to 422 BC, won a series of victories at comic competitions from 454 BC to 423 BC.
Middle Comedy occupies uncertain ground. Ancient scholars themselves struggled to mark where it began. The division between Old and Middle Comedy, one scholar noted, seemed to mean little more than "later than Aristophanes and his contemporaries, but earlier than Menander." The Alexandrine grammarians, and most likely Aristophanes of Byzantium in particular, appear to have been the first to formalize the three-period division, but those divisions were largely arbitrary. Comedy almost certainly developed constantly across the years.
Three clear changes do separate Middle Comedy from what came before it. The chorus, which had been a powerful dramatic force, shrank until it had no influence on the plot. Public figures were no longer impersonated or personified onstage. And the targets of ridicule shifted from specific politicians and named individuals toward more general human types, with literary rather than political subjects coming to the fore. For a period, mythological burlesque was especially popular among Middle Comic poets.
Stock characters began to crystallize during this era: courtesans, parasites, revelers, philosophers, boastful soldiers, and a figure described specifically as the conceited cook with his parade of culinary science. These recurring types would harden further as the form moved toward New Comedy.
Because no complete Middle Comic plays survived the centuries, any firm literary assessment remains impossible. Yet the plays appear to have been revived and performed in Sicily and Magna Graecia during this period, pointing toward their reach beyond Athens. Writers active in Middle Comedy include Antiphanes, who lived from around 408 to 334 BC, and Alexis, whose dates run from roughly 375 to 275 BC.
New Comedy began after the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC and lasted through the reign of the Macedonian rulers, coming to an end around 260 BC. Its closest modern relatives are situation comedy and comedy of manners. The three best-known playwrights of the period were Menander, Philemon, and Diphilus.
Menander, born around 342 BC and dying around 291 BC, did not always win against his contemporaries. Philemon, who lived from roughly 362 to 262 BC, regularly beat the younger Menander in competitions during their own lifetimes. But subsequent generations would reverse that judgment entirely. Horace later claimed Menander as a model for his own brand of Roman satire. An ancient critic posed the question of whether life influenced Menander in the writing of his plays, or whether the reverse was true.
What distinguished Menander was his attention to the interior lives of ordinary people. Where earlier comedies focused on politics and public affairs, his plays centered on the fears and foibles of private individuals: their personal relationships, family life, and social mishaps. His tone was gentle and urbane, marked by a taste for good temper and good manners. One example of the moral complexity he was capable of is Cnemon from the play Dyskolos, a misanthrope whose objections to life suddenly fade after he is rescued from a well. The fact that the character remains open to reason makes him recognizably human rather than a mere caricature.
The Dyskolos, meaning "Difficult Man" or "Grouch," is the most substantially preserved text of New Comedy. It was discovered on a papyrus and first published in 1958. The Cairo Codex, found in 1907, preserves long sections of several other plays, including Epitrepontes, Samia, and Perikeiromene.
Diphilus of Sinope, who lived from around 340 to 290 BC, stood apart from the other New Comedians by continuing to use mythological themes alongside everyday material. His comedies and those of Philemon survive only in fragments, but both were translated and adapted by the Roman playwright Plautus. Plautus' play Asinaria and his play Rudens are among the surviving examples drawn from Diphilus.
New Comedy populated its world with a cast of recognizable semi-realistic figures who would become the foundation of Western comic tradition. The braggarts, the stern father figure known as the senex iratus, the permissive father, young lovers, parasites, kind-hearted prostitutes, and cunning servants who fill Menander's plays are not purely original inventions. They are the refined products of generations of craft.
The dramatic tools those playwrights used were similarly inherited and refined. Prologues shaped the audience's expectations before the action began. Messengers' speeches announced what was happening offstage. Descriptions of feasts, the complications of romantic entanglement, sudden recognitions, and endings that resolved plot knots through unlikely divine or mechanical means were all established techniques by the time Menander reached his peak. His innovation was to take these devices and apply them with a subtlety and wit that earlier playwrights had not consistently achieved.
The 5-act structure that would later become standard in modern drama can first be observed in Menander's comedies. Where earlier comic generations had inserted choral interludes, his plays put dialogue with song in those breaks. Situations were conventional, coincidences were convenient, but the overall development of his plots moved smoothly and effectively.
Philemon's comedies were generally smarter in tone and broader in scope than Menander's. Both writers, along with Diphilus, funneled their theatrical legacy into Rome primarily through the adaptations of Plautus and Terence, and from there into the comic traditions of early modern Europe.
New Comedy shaped Western European literature in ways that are still visible today, passing through Plautus and Terence before reaching later dramatists. The comic drama of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, of Congreve and Wycherley, and in France the work of Molière all drew on the conventions and character types that New Comedy had established.
C. A. Trypanis described comedy as the last of the great species of poetry that Greece gave to the world. That description points toward the stakes of the tradition. Much of what we now call romantic comedy and situational comedy descends from the New Comedy sensibility, including generational comedies like All in the Family and Meet the Parents, as named in discussions of the form's influence.
A parallel stream of Greek comic drama developed separately in the Greek colonies of Magna Graecia by the late 4th century BC. Known as the phlyax play or hilarotragedy, this form blended tragic and comic elements into a burlesque hybrid. Its path ran alongside the Athenian tradition rather than directly through it.
The Alexandrine grammarians who sorted Greek comedy into its three canonical periods were themselves products of a culture that had already been shaped by what they were classifying. The artificial tidiness of Old, Middle, and New Comedy belies how continuously the form was evolving. Athenaeus of Naucratis is one of the authors whose relatively short fragments preserve what remains of Middle Comedy. Without his work and the Cairo Codex found in 1907, the picture of Greek comedy outside of Aristophanes would be even thinner than it already is.
Common questions
What is Ancient Greek comedy and what are its three periods?
Ancient Greek comedy was one of three principal dramatic forms in classical Greek theatre, alongside tragedy and the satyr play. Athenian comedy is divided into three periods: Old Comedy, represented mainly by the eleven surviving plays of Aristophanes; Middle Comedy, largely lost and preserved in short fragments; and New Comedy, known primarily through papyrus fragments of Menander and lasting from around 323 BC to about 260 BC.
Who was Aristophanes and why is he important to Ancient Greek comedy?
Aristophanes, born around 446 BC, is the most important playwright of Old Comedy and the primary reason the genre survives at all. He won more than twelve victories in comic competitions between 427 BC and 388 BC. His plays, including The Clouds and Lysistrata, defined Old Comedy through pungent political satire and the technique of disguising political attacks as buffoonery.
What is Menander's Dyskolos and why is it significant?
Dyskolos, meaning "Difficult Man" or "Grouch," is a comedy by Menander and the most substantially preserved text of New Comedy. It was discovered on a papyrus and first published in 1958. The play features a misanthrope named Cnemon whose resistance to others softens after he is rescued from a well.
How did New Comedy differ from Old Comedy in Ancient Greek theatre?
New Comedy shifted focus from political satire and named public figures to the everyday lives, family relationships, and social mishaps of ordinary people. The chorus was diminished, grotesque humor was reduced, and recurring stock characters such as the stern father, the young lover, and the cunning servant became central. The form is comparable to situation comedy and comedy of manners.
How did Ancient Greek comedy influence later Western literature?
Ancient Greek comedy, particularly New Comedy, influenced Western European literature primarily through the Latin adaptations of Plautus and Terence. Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Congreve, Wycherley, and Molière all drew on its conventions. The 5-act dramatic structure can first be observed in Menander's comedies, and much of contemporary romantic and situational comedy descends from the New Comedy tradition.
Who were the leading playwrights of New Comedy in Ancient Greece?
The three best-known New Comedy playwrights were Menander, Philemon, and Diphilus. Philemon of Soli or Syracuse, who lived from around 362 to 262 BC, regularly beat Menander in competitions during their own era. Menander, born around 342 BC, was more highly esteemed by later generations. Diphilus of Sinope, who lived from around 340 to 290 BC, was notable for using mythological themes alongside everyday subjects.
All sources
17 references cited across the entry
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