Mouseion: Journal of the Classical Association of Canada

This volume contains 14 papers on Athenian comedy, commissioned by the volume’s editors to honour Ian Storey on his retirement. The papers have been written independently of each other, on topics chosen by their authors. With one exception (the contribution of Csapo), most papers are text-centred and aim to elucidate a specific play and/or its reception.

Ian Storey’s work on comic fragments has been among the greatest contributions to the study of Greek comedy after the publication of Poetae Comici Graeci. Appropriately, then, several chapters aim to elucidate fragmentary plays. Henderson and Scharffenberger offer close studies of Cratinus’ Nemesis and Axionicus’ Phileuripides respectively. Both chapters will be indispensable to future students of these two plays. Rosen explores Timocles fr. 6 K-A, from the play Dionysiazousai, and argues that, in its original context, the fragment would have been perceived by the audience as a parody of “explicitly didactic theories of tragedy” (183). Konstan examines Crates frs 16–17 K-A, from the play Thêria, and proposes that the speakers might have been slaves in the guise of animals. The fragments describe a future world in which slavery will be ended, as there will be major technological innovations [End Page 352] and objects will be able to respond to human instructions and perform tasks on their own. On Konstan’s proposal, then, in Thêria it is slaves who are given a voice and envisage a world without slavery. Unfortunately, the content and context of Crates frs 16 and 17 do not allow for any secure conclusions regarding the identity of the speakers, so Konstan’s proposal remains only one possibility. It can be added to his arguments, however, that all instances of innovations and instruction-obeying objects proposed by the speakers in frs 16–17, apart from securing a comfortable life for the free while rendering slaves redundant, will also bring to the slaves of the present release from their chores and tasks: laying the table, making bread, serving, washing up, cooking (fr. 16), carrying and warming up water for the master’s bath, bringing over the master’s sponge and sandals (fr. 17). All instances, then, can conceivably represent not only generally human but specifically slave interests, and are thus compatible to the slave perspective proposed by Konstan.

C. W. Marshall’s paper argues for a connection between Cratinus and Menander in their “afterlife” in late antiquity. Marshall suggests that a third-century ad mosaic in the so-called House of Menander in Daphne in Antioch-on-the-Orontes, which depicts Menander reclining on a couch with a female figure named Glykera, while a second female figure named Comedy is standing by the other end of the same couch, might have evoked to some viewers the triangle Cratinus—Comedy as Cratinus’ neglected wife—Drunkenness as Cratinus’ mistress in Cratinus’ play Pytinê. This is a carefully argued suggestion, but one wonders how much the overall structure of the mosaic actually encourages the viewer to see a “love triangle” (188, 191), with Comedy as a “shunned wife” (192). Comedy on the mosaic is not depicted as the wronged and angry wife of Cratinus’ play, about to leave her husband and lodge a complaint against him for abusing her; pace Marshall, who goes so far as to describe her as “stern” (194 n.25), Comedy is depicted as serious but benign, and, crucially, as looking at the viewer, not at the couple.

The paper of Csapo, one of the richest and most important of the volume, is the only one which does not focus on a play or poet. It tries to locate the Dionysiac festival in which ritually licensed abuse, specifically abuse “‘from the wagons’ (τὰ ἐξ ἁμάξης) and ‘parade-abuse’ (πομπεία)” (19), took place. Csapo scrutinizes the relevant evidence and argues for the Dionysia, and against the other two festivals dedicated to Dionysus mentioned in ancient sources, namely the Lenaia and the Anthesteria...