Lost Plays of Old Comedy

This is the first accessible volume exploring and analysing evidence for Greek Old Comedy through what remains only in the form of fragments of plays. Hundreds of comedies were written and performed in Athens during this period (roughly 486-386 BCE), but only eleven survive intact from this era; all eleven are by the same author, Aristophanes. We are fortunate, however, to possess a substantial trove of evidence about the many other plays written before and during Aristophanes’ career, in the form of what we call fragments: excerpts, summaries, and quotations preserved in later Greek authors, as well as scraps harvested from the Greek papyri of Egypt. These materials are difficult to read, but can wonderfully enrich our sense of what was possible on the Greek comic stage.

Lost Plays of Old Comedy introduces readers to the nature of comic fragments, equipping them with methodological and interpretive tools to engage with this challenging but exciting material. It then presents a survey of important fragments in two parts: in part one, it reconstructs a set of three plays where the surviving material is sufficient to give us a broad sense of the plays’ content and staging; in part two, it charts a path beyond play-reconstruction by grouping fragments around key themes to build up a picture of the world created by the shared labour of the lost poets of Greek comedy.