Attic Comedy Language
Overview
This note was generated from the Greek studies corpus.
Key Passages
Passage 1
and political conditions in Athens toward the end of the fifth century, some because of conscious developments in Aristophanes’ own technique.1 Yet in each of the surviving plays, from the earliest to the last, obscene language and themes related to it, as we have described it in the previous chapters, play an important role in the characterization of personae, in the development of themes and ideas, in the plot and the action we see on stage. Having treated obscenity historically and analytically, it is now our task to examine briefly the nature of the dramatic function of this one aspect of Aristophanic comedy: which characters use obscenities, when and how they use them, what kinds of obscenities appear in what contexts, how sexual and scatological themes contribute to the general thematic develop- ment of individual plays or groups of plays. In the first part of this chapter we are concerned…
Passage 2
s consideration. Already the ground was being prepared for the great studies of rhetoric, dialectic, linguistics, and genre that would appear in a constant flow from the late fifth century on. Playwrights were required, no less than the public speakers, to be verbally entertaining, to use the great subtlety and flexibil- ity of Attic Greek to its best advantage. The audiences at Aristophanes’ plays were the same quick-witted public that attended the tragedies; they expected the same sophistication in both genres—more so, perhaps, from comic poets: in comedy there is no mythological grandeur and high emo- 1. For systematic discussions of Aristophanes’ comic methods, see W. Starkie, Achar- nians, pp. xxxviii ff., an analysis from the pseudo-Aristotelian Tractatus Coislinianus (in Kaibel, pp. 50 ff.; Cantarella, 1: 33 ff.); L. Grasberger, Die griechischen Stichnamen (Wurz- burg, 1883), pp. 11 ff.; C. Holzinger, De Verborum Lusu apud Aristophanem (Vienna, 1876); O. Froehde,…
Passage 3
the Socratic and sophistic schools, particularly the Isocra- tean, to ban on ethical and philosophical grounds a phenomenon which had already expired of old age and social uselessness. 109. For a thorough treatment, see Schmid, op. cit., 4: 441 ff.; F. Wehrli, Motivstudien zur griechischen Komodie (Basel, 1948), esp. pp. 27 ff. 2 Varieties of Obscene Expression: An Overview Before we attempt an examination of the dramatic and literary functions of obscene language in the extant plays of Aristophanes, it is necessary to make a preliminary analysis of the various kinds of obscenity that appear in the remains of Attic Comedy and are cataloged in the final chapters of this book. Our analysis will involve two inquiries: as far as our evidence allows, we must try to ascertain precisely (1) the aesthetic and psycho- logical effects created by each type of obscene terminology, and (2) to reconstruct, as an aid…
Connections
Sources
- Henderson_-The_Maculate_Muse_Obscene_Language_in