Official performances of comedies began in Athens at the City Dionysia festival in 487 or 486 B.C. and at the Lenaia festival sometime around 442 B.C.¹ The origins of the genre are obscure, and will most likely always remain so. According to the fourth-century philosopher Aristotle in his Poetics, comedy was originally performed in Athens by “volunteers” rather than by professional actors in a state-sponsored contest (1449b1–2); the genre grew out of “introductions to phallic songs,” i.e., from material associated with events like the Rural Dionysia that we see take place onstage at Acharnians lines 237–79 (1449a11–13)....

Acharnians was performed at the Lenaia festival in Athens in 425 B.C. and took first place in the balloting that came at the end, defeating Kratinos’ Storm-tossed and Eupolis’ New Moons, neither of which has been preserved. There can be little doubt that the original audience consisted mostly of average democrats, to whom the play must have appealed in some important way, since a majority of their representatives voted to award it the prize. This may at first be surprising, for the opening scenes in Acharnians in particular present Athens’ government as controlled not by the people themselves (as state...

DIKAIOPOLIS: You can’t imagine how many heartaches I’ve had! The number of good things that’ve happened to me is small, really small—maybe four. But my sufferings? Hah! Sand-zillions of them! Let’s see—what pleasure have I had worth mentioning? I guess I know one sight that warmed my heart—those five bars of silver Kleon puked up!¹ That made me smile, all right, and the Knights² earned my friendship by making it happen: “a deed worthy of Greece”³! But then I suffered something tragic, when I was sitting there stupidly expecting Aeschylus,⁴ and the herald said “Bring your chorus...

Only a small fraction of the thousands of literary works produced in antiquity have survived intact to the present day. In fact, the works of many authors have completely disappeared, thus leaving entire genres with only one or two representatives. Such is the case with Greek comedy. Every year, ten comedies by selected playwrights premiered in Athens. But until recently, the only specimens of this genre available to us were eleven plays by one playwright, Aristophanes, who wrote during the late fifth century B.C. The majority of his comedies revolve around fantastic situations that serve to comment upon the contemporary...

In 1959 the sands of Egypt surrendered a papyrus book that contained large portions of three plays by Menander, whose works had been lost since late antiquity. This find produced great excitement among scholars of ancient literature because it provided the first substantial sample of Greek New Comedy, which had been known only through scattered fragments and the Latin adaptations of Roman comic playwrights. The praise that Menander had garnered in the later Hellenistic and early Roman periods heightened the anticipation that preceded the publication of the papyrus.¹ Most scholars were certain that this find would at long last confirm...

PAN: Imagine this place is Phyle, part of Attica, and that I came out of the shrine of the nymphs. It belongs to the people of Phyle and to those who are able to till the stones here. It’s a very famous holy place. On the farm to my right lives Knemon, a man-shunning man indeed and grouchy to everyone. He doesn’t greet the crowd of people . . . “crowd,” did I say? This man’s lived a fairly long time and hasn’t spoken willingly to anyone, hasn’t uttered the first word to anyone except me, Pan, his next-door neighbor....

Plautus, with the name that barks,” quips the speaker of the prologue to Casina. An ancient commentator explains the joke by pointing out that “Plautus,” which literally means “flat,” here specifically alludes to the flat ears of a hound. The name Plautus may also give us a clue to the author’s origin, for the word appears to be a Latinized form of an Umbrian word, and ancient sources claim that his home was Sarsina (an Umbrian town to the northeast of Rome). While we have no way of proving that Sarsina was in fact Plautus’ home, it is a reasonable...

Casina is certainly among the latest of Plautus’ plays, if not the very latest. This has important implications for our study: Casina is not the work of a novice, a playwright struggling to master the craft of turning Greek scripts into Roman plays; rather, this is the work of an old pro with over twenty years of success to draw upon. The unparalleled metrical sophistication, the rapid development and tight structure of the plot, and the robustness of the humor suggest that Casina is the culmination of a career, a masterwork that builds upon and reacts to the traditions of...

I bid you welcome, most excellent spectators! You show the greatest devotion to good faith—as Good Faith does to you!¹ If I’m right, give me a clear sign, so that I’ll know right from the start that you’re on my side. (pauses for applause)

I think people who enjoy vintage wine and vintage plays have good taste. Since old-fashioned craftsmanship and language please you, vintage plays ought to please you most of all. Nowadays the new comedies they produce are even more debased than the new coins.² So after we heard the rampant rumor that you fervidly fancy Plautine...

According to the ancient Roman biographer Suetonius, Publius Terentius Afer was born in Carthage, in modern-day Tunisia in North Africa. If Suetonius’ sources can be trusted (they are not always reliable), Terence may himself have been a Carthaginian, and therefore Semitic. Given his cognomen Afer (“African”), however, he also may have been of an ethnicity native to Africa: probably a relative of modern North Africans, but it is not beyond the realm of possibility that he is the world’s first extant black author. Suetonius also tells us that Terence was later a slave at Rome—whether he was born a...

Terence’s prologues concern themselves principally with literary and theatrical polemics, not with the plays to come. The prologue of Phormio, however, includes one piece of information that is of great significance to the play as a whole. Terence informs his audience that the Greek play he adapted (we know from other sources that it was by the playwright Apollodorus) was called Epidicazomenos, or “The One Being Sued.” Terence’s Latin play, however, is called Phormio, “because the parasite Phormio will play the lead role, and will instigate most of the action.” Phormio is the only play in which Terence changed the...

PROLOGUE: (spoken by an anonymous actor) Well, that old playwright² is at it again. He’s tried before to discourage our playwright and force him to retire, but he hasn’t succeeded. So now he’s decided to scare him off with insults. He’s been going around saying that what our playwright has written up to now has been weak in diction, anemic in style. Well, I suppose that’s because our playwright has never put onstage a young man hallucinating, convinced he sees a deer pursued by dogs, begging and pleading with him to rescue her.³

You know, that old playwright wouldn’t be...