[In the following excerpt, originally published in German in 1963, Lesky examines the subject matter and polemics of several of Cratinus's plays.]

If we were asked whether the Attic genius was most fully and characteristically shown in Sophocles or in Aristophanes, we should have to reply ‘In both’. Either by himself is only half the picture: to see it whole we must view together the sublime poetry of human suffering and the colourful extravagance of a comic invention which has never known a rival.

In an earlier chapter we discussed various popular usages, the Attic carnival and several other nuclei of primitive comedy in the attempt to trace at least the outlines of this rather complex picture. All these primitive elements are taken up into the supreme creations of Old Comedy; but how much else there is to make up the fascinating motley of these delightful plays! The manifold richness of life in Athens' proudest days, the heights and depths of her ambitious politics, her well-stocked markets, the foibles of her eccentrics (not all of them harmless), the inrush of new ideas and the revolution in art—all this is caught in a magical mirror in the hand of a genius who never allows us to lose sight, behind these thousand flickering lights, of the realities of life and the seriousness of his own convictions.

The Alexandrians were the first to divide the history of comedy into three stages: the Old Comedy, culminating in Aristophanes, the New, best represented by Menander, and a Middle Comedy in between. If we try to give figures and to date the change between 400 and 320, we must remember that the boundaries are in fact very fluid. We shall find in due course that Middle Comedy is a conception that is very hard to define.

While we can assume that the three great tragedians had no real rivals, the situation in Old Comedy is different. Here again there was a canon of three poets, which Horace has smoothly versified (serm. 1. 4, 1): Eupolis atque Cratinus Aristophanesque poetae. But in addition we know of a large number of other poets of Old Comedy who, if we judge by ancient reports and the extant fragments, claimed a respectable place beside the canonical three. All told, we know of some forty poets of the Old Comedy, although often it is a matter of a name and some titles. To give a complete list¹ would be alien to the purpose of this book: what we propose rather is to sketch in the salient features of the background against which Aristophanes stood.

A word must be said to justify the heading of this chapter. ‘Political’ comedy is not meant as comedy dealing with current politics, although Old Comedy does take much of its material from that source: the epithet rather refers to the intimate association of the genre with the common life of the polis, an association which in its closeness is unequalled anywhere else in Greek literature.

Aristophanes himself gives us an interesting light on the history of comedy in the parabasis of the Knights (517), where he proves how fickle the taste of the Athenian public is by citing examples of the rise and fall of earlier writers. He names first of all Magnes … as one of the earliest writers of comedy. His eleven victories at the great Dionysia made him the most successful poet of Old Comedy, but all we have of him is a few titles. Among these the Wasps and Frogs are worthy of notice (he probably wrote a Birds as well) as illustrating the old practice of animal choruses which we found at the beginning of comedy. They also point out the general background to Aristophanes' work.

An older poet even than Magnes is the Chionides whom we mentioned in the same context, the first victor at the Dionysia in 486. The inscriptions enable us to trace this competition as far down as 120 b.c. From the very beginning, probably, the number of comedies presented in one day was five. We know that at the Great Dionysia four days—the 10th to the 13th of Elaphebolion—were set apart for dramatic presentations, and it is widely believed, although we do not know for sure,² that the 10th was the day for comedy. In the darkest hours of the Peloponnesian war the number of comedies was reduced to three, and three days (probably the 10th, 11th and 13th) were celebrated by the performance on each of one tragic tetralogy and one comedy. At the Lenaea also five poets took part, each with one comedy, and here again the great war caused the number to be brought down to three.

Ancient tradition gives 24 as the number of the chorus in Old Comedy—twice the number of the old tragic chorus. We shall discuss the number of the actors when we deal with Cratinus.

Among the oldest comic writers known to us we must place Ecphantides. Two verses of his (fr. 2 K.) are worth notice, since they express a determined rejection of Megarian comedy. Thus we find here a feature that recurs in Aristophanes: an emphatic claim to a higher artistic level than the coarse jokes of Dorian comedy—although its slapstick element was of course indispensable. We are given some light on this early stage of Old Comedy by a late notice³ which says that the plays of Chionides and Magnes never ran to more than 300 verses. Since most of these belonged to the chorus, we have to think rather of detached comic scenes than of a continuous plot.

The same section of the Knights gives a very individual picture of Cratinus,⁴ one of the canonical three, as we saw. His production, which brought him six victories at the Dionysia and three at the Lenaea, can be traced from the mid-fifth century to about 423. We have 28 titles of his plays, and we know enough about them to see that his themes were as multifarious as those of Aristophanes: politics rubbed shoulder with fairy-tale, literary criticism with travesties of mythology. Pericles was his favourite target. In his Nemesis he took the story of Zeus' relations with that goddess and the engendering of Helen, and used it to attack Pericles, showing him dressed as Zeus trying to carry out his disastrous projects. We can form a clearer idea of the contents of the Dionysalexandros, since a papyrus from Oxyrhynchus (nr. 163 P.) has the greater part of the hypothesis. It must have been an extravagant burlesque of the judgment of Paris and its consequences, with Dionysus playing the part of Paris and trying to sneak off when things began to warm up. This mixture of parodied mythology and topical allusion, only possible in Old Comedy, must have been directed against Pericles as a wanton warmonger and simultaneously against Aspasia. The account of the contents shows us that we must suppose Cratinus to have had a great wealth of comic elements, but much looseness in construction. The hypothesis of the Dionysalexandros enables us to understand the judgment of an ancient critic,⁵ that Cratinus had a very happy invention where the main outline of a play was concerned, but he lacked the ability to carry his concepts into proper execution.

‘Onion-headed Pericles with the Odeon on his skull’ (fr. 71 K.) was severely handled also in the Chirones. The chorus of this piece consisted of wise old Centaurs who lamented the better times that were gone and deplored the corruption of Athens under Pericles and Aspasia. We have a fragment from the end of the play, which contains for once a reference to the poet's literary labours: this play, which seems to have been his favourite, cost him two years' hard work to complete.

The picture of Pericles in Old Comedy shows how rapidly the passage of time vindicates what has been condemned. When Eupolis produced his Demoi in 412, he was able to call up Pericles from Hades to bear witness to a happier past.

The attacks of Cratinus must have been exceedingly obscene. One is surprised to read⁶ that Aristophanes fell far behind him in this respect. Cratinus has sometimes been hailed as having founded the drama of political satire, but in fact this kind of attack is found in the earliest Attic comedy. It is possible that Cratinus converted into topical political satire what had previously been attacks on neighbours and private citizens.

We should not exaggerate the importance of these political polemics, however obscene and offensive they may have been: they were all within the limits of a jester's licence and were not taken too seriously. There were, nevertheless, attempts from time to time to restrict the freedom of comedy, although many of the ancient stories in that connection are pure fable. A proposal of that nature in 440 must be considered historical, but it had little effect. The same may be said of the proposal of Syracusius in 415 which forbade attacks on named persons (ὀνομαsτὶ κωμῳδgeι̑ν). All these were attempts which lacked the means of execution.

Cratinus also took his age to task where religion and art were concerned. His comedy The Thracian Women was directed against foreign cults like that of Bendis, while his Panoptae attacked the know-all attitude of the sophists. The Archilochoi featured a contest between great poets of old, and it is significant that he brings in Archilochus in this connection, whose biting iambics were close in spirit to Old Comedy. We mention the Satyroi purely to show that these boon companions could be received as guests into comedy as well, and the Odysseus ('Οδυssῃ̑ς) as being a parodied version of the adventure with the Cyclops, but apparently without any satirical purpose. The Ploutoi must have had a strong flavour of fairy-tale, to judge from the fragments on a papyrus from Oxyrhynchus.⁷ The spirits of wealth rise up in this play to make a survey of deserved and undeserved prosperity in Athens.

Cratinus gained his last victory in the Great Dionysia in 423 with a comedy which scored a special success. The year before, Aristophanes in the parabasis of the Knights had spoken flatteringly of Cratinus' great comic power in his earlier years, but had painted a sorry picture of him in old age, a drunkard who had outlived his art. The object of this attack struck back: laughing at himself as only a genius can, he brought himself and his weaknesses onto the stage. He showed his wife, Comoedia, complaining bitterly of his relations with the idle slut Methe (drunkenness) and of his running after Oeniscus (‘little wine’: depicted as a pretty boy). The poet, however, defends the gifts of the god of comedy, being deeply convinced that the man who drinks only water will never create anything worth while (fr. 199). The Athenians agreed with him, and this play, the Pytine, was victorious over Aristophanes' Clouds.

In Tzetzes' Prolegomena de comoedia (Kaibel, Com. Gr. Fr. p. 18) we find the positive statement that Cratinus put an end to the previous freedom in the number of actors and limited it thenceforth to three. We are justified in doubting this statement, since Aristotle (Poet. 5. 1449 b 4) confesses that he does not know various details of early comedy, among which he includes the number of the players. We can believe Tzetzes' statement that the number of actors was at first not fixed, but the restriction to three is contradicted by the extant plays of Aristophanes, in which sometimes as many as five are needed.⁸

Notes

1. As in Schmid's fourth volume.

2. A. Pickard-Cambridge, The Dramatic Festivals of Athens. Oxf. 1953, 64.

3. Corp. Gloss. Lat. 5. 181; now in Gloss. Lat. ed. Acad. Britann., 1, 128.

4. B. Marzullo, ‘Annotazioni critiche a Cratino’. Stud. z. Textgesch. u. Textkritik. Cologne 1959, 133.

5. Platonius in Kaibel, Com. Gr. Fr. 1. 6.

6. Platonius loc. laud.

7. Nr. 164 P.; D. L. Page, Greek Literary Papyri, 1950, 196.

8. Pickard-Cambridge, Dram. Fest. 148.