they took flight after the final battle, had been given food and water for reciting
some of his lyrics.
(Life of Nicias, 29)Old Comedy: Aristophanes (c. 450–c. 385)
The origins of comedy were obscure to Aristotle but he records the view that the
word is derived from kome, a village, because comedians were turned out of towns
and went strolling around the villages (Poetics, 3), rather than komos, revel, the
preferred derivation of modern scholars. Revels which took place on festival days
might end with the participants parading the streets, garlanded and with torches,
singing, dancing, drinking and making merry. Aristotle also says that comedy came
from improvisations connected with phallic songs (associated with fertility and the
worship of Dionysus) still surviving in the institutions of many of the cities of his day,
and that the earliest plot makers were Sicilian.
In Athens comedy, like tragedy, was a state institution performed at the Great
Dionysia and also at a special festival in January called the Lenaia. The chorus
(consisting of twenty-four members who might be divided into two half-choruses)
was provided by a choregos whose responsibility it was to hire, train and fit out its
members at his own expense. The actors, whose number does not seem to have been
restricted as in tragedy, wore masks of a grotesque kind, special footwear called the
comic sock and often had a phallic emblem. Their costumes were extravagantly
padded.
The only surviving complete comedies of the fifth century representing what was
subsequently called by the ancients the Old Comedy are nine plays by Aristophanes.
A further two plays by Aristophanes of a slightly different character survive from the
early fourth century. The first most striking feature of Old Comedy is the satirical
character and the ridiculing invective against named individuals, whether politicians
like Pericles and Cleon, philosophers and thinkers like Socrates, or poets like
Euripides. Many other individuals (whose significance is often lost upon us now) are
also named, including notable or newsworthy characters of the city presumably
present in the audience. Hence the verb komodein, meaning to represent in comedy,
is also used in this period to mean to satirise, ridicule, lampoon or libel. A second
striking feature is a persistent and frank indecency with regard to sexual matters and
bodily functions. In Lysistrata, for example, when the women of Athens and Sparta
agree to bring the war to an end by withdrawing their sexual services until peace is
concluded, the menfolk are in an acutely priapic state for much of the play.
Aristophanic laughter acts as a kind of release from normal social embarrass-
ment and inhibition. Most plays involve some extravagant fantasy: the Birds, for
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