A Comic Production With Phlyax Actors (probably so-called for their padded costumes), on a vase made in Apulia
about 375 BC. They resemble Athenian comic actors in their dress, masks, and prominent phalli. They do not act
in a formal theatre but on a low wooden stage, with lean-to roof and steps up from the auditorium, seen here in
profile. To judge from the vases the subjects were comic versions of Greek myth and some everyday situations
recalling Athenian Middle and New Comedy. Here the old centaur Chiron (but shown as human) is helped on to
the stage by Xanthias. Comic nymphs watch (top right), and standing at the right is a 'normal' youth, perhaps the
stage-manager. This is a theatrical genre peculiar to South Italy in the fourth century BC. See also p. 443.
The Results of Comedy
Without comedy, without the long development and the transformations of comedy at Athens, there would have
been no invention of pastoral poetry or the fishermen's poetry that corresponds to it. The romance, and the novel
that arose in the end from plays and romances, have their taproot in the comic theatre. They derive from Euripides
as well, but only because comedy had shown how Euripides could be adapted and travestied. The oddest of all the
survivals of Greek comedy was through its offshoot as Latin comedy, in the revived Latin and vernacular comedy
of the renaissance. That line of descent is much more direct and easier to trace than the rediscovery of tragedy,