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C. W. Marshall – George Kovacs (Hgg.), No Laughing Matter. Studies in AthenianComedy, London (Bristol Classical Press – Bloomsbury Academic) 2012, XIV,208 S., ISBN 978-1-78093-015-2 (brosch.) £ 25,–Reviewed by Ian A. Ruffell: Glasgow, E-Mail: ian.ruffell@glasgow.ac.ukDOI 10.1515/klio-2016-0063This volume is a „Festschrift“ for the Canadian scholar Ian Storey, who is bestknown for his work on Old Comedy, and in particular the fragments of Old Co-medy, notably „Eupolis. Poet of Old Comedy“ (Oxford 2003) and the Loeb „Frag-ments of Old Comedy“ (Cambridge, MA u. a. 2011). The contributions that theeditors have assembled (mainly from scholars based in Canada or the USA) areaccordingly all focused on Athenian Comedy of the fifth and fourth centuries, andthere is thus a commendably tight focus for a production of this sort.The fourteen papers fall into two main categories: discussions of a frag-mentary play (or even a single fragment) and treatments of plays by Aristophanes.The papers in the first category are certainly helpful. The collection opens withJeffrey Henderson looking at the evidence for Kratinos’ mythological burlesque,Nemesis. He locates this play (alongwithDionysalexandros) at the beginning of thePeloponnesian War and provides a sure-footed guide to the play’s location withinthe mythological variants of the Helen and Nemesis stories. Henderson acceptsthat there were topical references, but is understandably reluctant to commithimself on how sustained the political allegory was or how exactly the plot de-veloped. Kratinos’ contemporary Krates is the focus of the following article byDavid Konstan. His discussion of Thēria („Beasts“), one of the plays that Athe-naeus quotes from in discussing narratives of spontaneous abundance, is parti-cularly interested in how seriously the utopian vision of the play made the case forthe abolition of slavery. The animals themselves, according to Konstan, explorethis idea in a way that would have been impossible for slave characters to dothemselves on the Athenian stage. At the other end of the collection, ElizabethScharffenberger provides a commentary on the Middle Comic poet Axionicus’„Euripides Fan“ (Phileuripides), with particular interest in the lyric of fr. 4, whichshe argues continues techniques of Euripides parody demonstrated by Aristo-phanes in „Frogs“. Finally, Ralph Rosen presents a discussion of Timokles’ Dio-nysiazousai fr. 6, which presents an argument for the practical benefit of tragedy,mainly in terms of degrees of comparative suffering. Rosen suggests that this hasbeen taken far too literally as a reflection of fourth-century literary theory, and thatit should be seen instead as a parody of a moralising argument for Greek tragedy.Rosen is, I think, clearly right that there is a comic hyperbole here, but I wonderLiteraturkritik 751Brought to you by | University of Glasgow LibraryAuthenticatedDownload Date | 12/5/16 1:47 PMwhether this is as much pointing up the absurdity of tragedy as it is skewering li-terary-critical pretension.The papers in the second category are more of a mixed bag. Keith Sidwell andAlan Sommerstein revisit previous work. Sidwell restates his account of the„Acharnians“ as a metacomic parody of Eupolis via various suggestions of Krati-nos, originally stated in „Aristophanes’ Acharnians and Eupolis“, CeM 45, 1994,71–115, and elaborated in „Aristophanes the Democrat. The Politics of SatiricalComedy during the Peloponnesian War“ (Cambridge 2009). I doubt that this re-working will win new converts. Sommerstein offers a small sequence of notes on„Frogs“, which are a supplement to his Aris and Phillips commentary (1996).Hallie Marshall compares Aristophanes and Eupolis in terms of revisions and re-performances, in making the case that the text of „Clouds“ we possess should beapproached as a performance text, even if it was never actually performed. Therearemany sensible points here about the nature of comic revisions and reworkings,but I would have been more comfortable about the discussion of „Clouds“ II interms of reperformance if the evidence for incomplete revision (mentioned on p.55) had been addressed directly.The two other papers on „Frogs“ take amore conventional essay form. DonaldSells follows in the steps of a number of scholars who have investigated the con-tinuities between the chorus of initiates’ ritual-literary utterances and Aristopha-nes’ comic poetics, and argues that the Aeschylean victory is transcended by themanipulation of Eleusinian ideas to bolster comedy’s political and poetic stan-ding. Arlene Allan traces the echoes in the play of Arginousai and the illegal trial ofthe generals that followed, instigated by Theramenes. She argues that there is asustained protest by Aristophanes and that, despite the election of Theramenesshortly after the play was first performed, the play had a slow-burn effect and ledto some kind of reprisals upon the instigators, to which Xenophon alludes (hell.1.7.35). It is possible that „Frogs“may have contributed to a feeling of remorse, butclearly the Athenian assembly could change its mind without any nudge from thecomedians, as the Mytilene Debate clearly indicates (as well as Aristophanes’ owncomplaints about their fickleness).„Lysistrata“ and „Ecclesiazousai“ present many similar problems to critics,and the papers on those plays here share certain characteristics. Judith Fletcherexamines the latter in terms of due legal and procedural process. For Fletcher, theplay is a dystopia, and the abuse of process is part of that nightmare vision. Thewomen’s decree, she argues, is a decree (psēphisma), but becomes talked about asif it were a fundamental law (nomos), it ought to be subject to a graphē paranomōn,since it contradicts established laws, but the courts have been abolished, and it isestablished by deception. Fletcher draws attention to the legal language throug-hout the scene with the young man and the „hags“: this is, she argues, the main752 LiteraturkritikBrought to you by | University of Glasgow LibraryAuthenticatedDownload Date | 12/5/16 1:47 PMsource of humour in the scene. There is a lot to like in this paper, but as an accountof the play it seemed rather one-eyed, to say the least, something exacerbated bythe short length that the authors seem to have been allowed.Similar factors seem to be evident in the contribution by Douglas Olson on„Lysistrata“, which is trenchant but lacks nuance. The key argument here is thatthe play reflects the politics of 412 rather than 411 (even allowing for the evidencefor last-minute changes, which Olson notes). His method is to argue first that co-mic poets had to reflect the views of its audience, and second that the politicalcontent can be found once all the humour and other distractions have been sub-tracted (gender, for example, is „a comic red herring“, 74). Thus he argues interalia that the seizing of the Acropolis and Lysistrata’s famous wool-working alle-gory about cleaning up the body politic reflect a broad desire for a benevolent coupand a purge of the citizenry. Nonetheless, this had no influence on the audience of411, and does notmean that Aristophanes was a crypto-oligarch or approved of theoligarchic coup. I have doubts myself that this fits the narrative of events thatThucydides gives us, but I have even more reservations that this is a productivemode of analysis of either comedy or politics, not least in this most politicallyanxious and divided of periods.Much more nuance is on display in the last of the papers on Aristophanes, byRobert Tordoff. It also has the best title, „Carion Down the Piraeus: The TragicMessenger Speech in Aristophanes’Wealth“, although regrettably the influence ofMessrs Hawtrey, James and Williams goes no deeper. This paper is ostensibly ananalysis of the speeches by Carion at „Wealth“ 627–770, arguing that it is athorough-going parody of a tragic messenger-speech, albeit of a somewhat un-reliable kind. In fact, the paper offers a much broader examination of the role ofCarion within the play. It shows how the expanded role of the slave wasengineered, but also how Carion’s activities at the Asclepieion mark him as thekind of person who will not profit from the new regime, and how the slave gets hiscome-uppance and returns to his master’s household in the final reckoning.Beyond the papers that fall into these two broad categories, Eric Csapo con-tinues his examination of the early history of the Dionysia by reconsidering refe-rences to „parade abuse“ (πομπεία) or abuse „from the wagons“ (τὰ ἐξ ἁμάξης),which he argues should be attached to the City Dionysia rather than the Lenaia orAnthestieria that later sources specify; and one of the editors, Marshall, presents areception-based paper, and argues for a visual allusion to Kratinos’ Pytinē („Wine-flask“) in a third century CE mosaic from Daphne, near Syrian Antioch, whichfeatures Menander and the courtesan Glykera, with Comedy as a third figure.Marshall makes the case that Kratinos was not unknown in the Greek East ataround this time, although the representation does not, to my mind, compel thereading of a love triangle.Literaturkritik 753Brought to you by | University of Glasgow LibraryAuthenticatedDownload Date | 12/5/16 1:47 PMAs with so many collections of this type, the result is something of a curate’segg, with some contributions more substantial or effective than others. There isgood close reading of fragments or passages, and some interesting broader pieces,but the scale of the work militates against more significant contributions. In sum,this is not a volume that will change the way that we view ancient Greek comedy,but it is a coherent and useful one that serious scholars will need to know.Danielle L. Kellogg, Marathon Fighters and Men of Maple. Ancient Acharnai, Ox-ford – New York (Oxford University Press) 2013, XIV, 348 S., 9 Abb., 1 Kte., ISBN978-0-19-964579-4 (geb.) £ 75, –Reviewed by Robin Osborne, Cambridge, E-Mail: ro225@cam.ac.ukDOI 10.1515/klio-2016-0064It is now almost thirty years since a flurry of work on both sides of the Atlanticbrought the countryside and communities of Attica into the scholarly limelight (Ithink of J. Ober’s „Fortress Attica. Defense of the Athenian land frontier. 404–382B.C.“ [Mnemosyne 84], Leiden 1985, D. Whitehead’s „The Demes of Attica. 508/7 –ca. 250 B.C. A Political and Social Study“, Princeton 1986, and N. F. Jones’s „PublicOrganization in Ancient Greece. A documentary Study“ [Memoirs of the AmericanPhilosophical Society 176], Philadelphia 1987 aswell asmy „Demos. The Discoveryof Classical Attika“ [Cambridge Classical Studies], Cambridge u. a. 1985; and notealso R. Garland’s „The Piraeus. From the 5th to the 1st century B.C.“, Ithaca – NewYork 1987). Since then a lot of work has taken place – historical, epigraphic andarchaeological. It makes sense therefore to revisit classical Attica, and, despiteMoses Finley’s famous opposition to city histories, inevitably cited here, it is nocrazy idea to do so by looking in close detail at the most populous of all Atheniandemes, Acharnai.The last generation of work on the Athenian demes revealed demes as im-portant nodes of Athenian civic life, basic to Athenian citizen identity, but indi-vidually various. Deme life was revealed as complementary to the civic life of thepolis, parallel rather than hierarchically subordinate, with individuals generallychoosing to get involved either with their demes orwith central polismatters ratherthan training themselves locally for central activities. At the religious level demeswere shown to be both locking in to the central festival calendar, whether by activeinvolvement in central festivals or by arranging their own parallel celebrations. Asto what demes looked like on the ground, there was more dispute. WesleyThompson’s arguments against demes being bounded territorial units gained so-me support, particularly once Antony Andrewes had shown how easy it was to754 LiteraturkritikBrought to you by | University of Glasgow LibraryAuthenticatedDownload Date | 12/5/16 1:47 PM

C. W. Marshall and G. Kovacs (eds), No Laughing Matter: Studies in Athenian Comedy (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2012)

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C. W. Marshall and G. Kovacs (eds), No Laughing Matter: Studies in Athenian Comedy (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2012)

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