Clay Figures Of Comic Actors, both masked, and the one on the right wearing the characteristic short padded
dress with phallus attached. Fourth century B.C. These are from Attica, which is the principal source, but the types
are met all over the Greek world and the masks shown on these and later figures can often be matched closely with
those defined by the second-century A.D. writer Pollux for use on the Attic stage.
Comedy had its solemn as well as its political side. The plots were topsy-turvy. Right deserted to the side of
Wrong, you could fly to heaven on a beetle, but the bawdy irreverence -with which gods and men were treated was
somehow set in a frame, it -was 'only a joke'. Serious things like peace, the city of Athens and her goddess and her
physical beauty, were handled gently and beautifully. It is the few nostalgic verses, and those haunting lyrics in
which poetry is suddenly set free from the comic action, which one never forgets. Aristophanes intended to give
pleasure in as many ways as possible, and he still does so. Some of his allusive jokes that were meant to go fast
raise only a gentle smile on the tired faces of scholars. Some of the puns and obscenities are only as memorable as
their modern equivalent, for better and worse. But Aristophanes probably intended only his lyrics to be learnt by
heart in Athens. Unfortunately they have never been successfully translated; almost no Aristophanes has been.
The greatest comic poet we know much about before Aristophanes is Cratinus. They overlapped; young
Aristophanes attacked old Cratinus as a drunk who had given up poetry. Cratinus replied the next year, 423 B.C.,