The origins of the Old Comedy were traced by Aristotle to the komos or celebratory festival processions of ancient Greece, and the phallic songs that accompanied them. Although the earliest Athenian comedy, from the 480s to 440s BC, is almost entirely lost, it is clear that comedy had already crystallised into a highly structured form, with the chorus playing a central role. The most important poets of the period were Magnes, whose work survives only in a few fragments of dubious authenticity, and Cratinus, who took the prize at the City Dionysia probably sometime around 450 BC. Although no complete plays by Cratinus are preserved, they are known through hundreds of fragments: he was noted in antiquity both for a mastery of plot and for the obscene vehemence of his attacks on Pericles.
Aristophanes and his contemporaries
Aristophanes satirized and lampooned the most prominent personalities and institutions of his time, as can be seen, for example, in his scurrilous portrayal of Socrates in The Clouds, and in his racy anti-war farce Lysistrata. Aristophanes was only one of a large number of comic poets, however, working in Athens in the late 5th century BC; his biggest rivals were Hermippus and Eupolis. Classical literary criticism placed Aristophanes somewhere between the harshness of Cratinus and the smoothness of Eupolis. All the Old Comedy writers worked within a highly structured format – parados, agon, and parabasis – which paradoxically offered maximum scope for improvisatory flights of fancy. Song, dance, costume, and chorus all played important roles, as did the parody of the ‘senior’ drama, tragedy. Possibly due to the influence of tragedy was the important role of a heroic figure in Aristophanic comedy: as Northrop Frye put it, “In Aristophanes there is usually a central figure who constructs his own society in the teeth of strong opposition”. The diminished role of the protagonist in his latest works marks a point of transition to the Middle comedy.
Later influence/parallels
Horace claimed a formative role for the Old Comedy in the making of Roman satire.
