A Caution About “Satire”
Greek comedy is often described as the birthplace of Western satire. That is partly right: the Athenian comic poets of the fifth century BCE attacked politicians, generals, philosophers and fellow poets by name, often in outrageous ways. But satire as a literary genre is usually traced to Roman writers, and Roman authors themselves said so. It is safer to say that Old Comedy supplied one of the earliest surviving examples of public, topical mockery of those in power.
Old Comedy
Comedy became part of the official contests of the City Dionysia in the 480s BCE, according to tradition, and was also performed at the Lenaia festival. The form we know best is called Old Comedy and belongs mostly to the later fifth century. Its features are distinctive:
- A chorus, sometimes dressed as animals or other fantastic creatures, such as the birds of one play and the wasps of another.
- A fantastic central idea, such as a private peace treaty or a city built in the sky.
- A parabasis, a section in which the chorus addresses the audience directly, often speaking for the poet.
- Open obscenity and physical humour, linked to the festival’s roots in the cult of Dionysus.
- Direct attacks on named, living public figures.
Only one Old Comedy poet is represented by complete plays: Aristophanes. Other poets, such as Cratinus and Eupolis, were highly regarded in their time, but we know them mainly from fragments and later comment.
Aristophanes
Aristophanes was active from the 420s BCE into the early fourth century BCE. Eleven of his plays survive. His career spans most of the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta, and that war runs through his work.
- Acharnians (425 BCE) follows a farmer who makes his own private peace with Sparta because the official war drags on.
- Knights (424 BCE) mercilessly attacks the politician Cleon, who was then at the height of his influence. According to Aristophanes himself, Cleon had previously tried to take him to court.
- Clouds (423 BCE) mocks Socrates as a head-in-the-air teacher of clever argument. The version we have is a later revision. Plato’s account of Socrates’ trial in 399 BCE refers to this kind of portrayal as one source of prejudice against him, although how much it mattered is debated. The comic Socrates also has little in common with the Socratic method of patient questioning that Plato describes, and Aristophanes appears in a friendlier light as a speaker in Plato’s dialogue set at a Greek symposium.
- Wasps (422 BCE) pokes fun at Athenian enthusiasm for jury service, a theme that touches the way Athenian jury courts worked.
- Birds (414 BCE) sends two Athenians off to found a city in the clouds.
- Lysistrata (411 BCE) has women across Greece go on a sex strike to force an end to the war. Its heroine is Athenian, but a Spartan woman, Lampito, also appears, and the play is a comic fantasy, not evidence of any real political movement of women.
- Frogs (405 BCE) sends the god Dionysus to the underworld to bring back a dead tragic poet, and stages a contest between Aeschylus and Euripides.
The last example shows how closely comedy was tied to tragedy. Comic poets parodied tragic scenes constantly, and their jokes only work if the audience knew the originals.
How Free Was the Speech?
Old Comedy is sometimes presented as proof of unlimited free speech in Athenian democracy. The reality is more complicated. Comic poets could make sharp jokes in a festival setting, and the city, as far as we can tell, generally allowed it. But there are traces of attempts to restrict comic abuse, and the evidence for specific laws is thin and disputed. Aristophanes’ jokes also came from a particular point of view, often conservative and hostile to demagogues, new intellectual fashions and the war. Satire, even when aimed at power, does not necessarily represent the whole city’s opinion.
It is also worth remembering that the audience was judge. Comic poets competed for prizes, so they depended on making a large crowd laugh. Their targets were people the audience already had mixed feelings about.
From Old to New Comedy
After the Peloponnesian War ended in Athenian defeat in 404 BCE, and especially after Athens lost its independence of action under Macedonian power in the later fourth century BCE, comedy changed. Scholars use the term Middle Comedy for the transitional phase, though little of it survives. Aristophanes’ last plays, Assemblywomen and Wealth, already show fewer attacks on named individuals and a smaller role for the chorus.
New Comedy, dominant from the late fourth century BCE, centred on domestic stories: young lovers, strict fathers, clever slaves, mistaken identities, lost children recognized at the end. The chorus faded into musical interludes. Its best-known writer was Menander, who lived from roughly 342 to 290 BCE. For centuries most of Menander survived only as quotations, and he was known mainly through Roman adaptations. A nearly complete play, Dyskolos (“The Grouch”), came to light on papyrus in the twentieth century, and it was said to have won first prize in 316 BCE. Since then, other substantial fragments have been recovered.
Why It Matters
New Comedy had an enormous afterlife. The Roman playwrights Plautus and Terence adapted Greek models, and through them stock characters such as the boastful soldier, the cunning slave and the miserly father entered later European theatre. Old Comedy mattered differently: it left a model for topical, irreverent writing about public life, reflected later in Roman verse satire and in many modern comic traditions.
Seen together, the two phases show how comedy responds to its society. In an assertive democracy at war, it turned its attention to leaders and policies. In a world of smaller city-states under larger kingdoms, it turned inward to families and manners, a shift that reflects the wider change from the age of the classical polis to the Hellenistic world. Reading either one alone gives a partial picture of what ancient Greek audiences found funny.