The Play of Language in Ancient Greek Comedy

Comic Discourse and Linguistic Artifices of Humour, from Aristophanes to Menander

Kostas Apostolakis, Ioannis M. Konstantakos, Kostas E. Apostolakis

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2024
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9783111295992
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Ancient Greek comedy relied primarily on its text and words for the fulfilment of its humorous effects and aesthetic goals. In the wake of a rich tradition of previous scholarship, this volume explores a variety of linguistic materials and stylistic artifices exploited by the Greek comic poets, from vocabulary and figures of speech (metaphors, similes, rhyme) to types of joke, obscenity, and the mechanisms of parody. Most of the chapters focus on Aristophanes and Old Comedy, which offers the richest arsenal of such techniques, but the less ploughed fields of Middle and New Comedy are also explored. Emphasis is placed on practical criticism and textual readings, on the examination of particular artifices of speech and the analysis of individual passages. The main purpose is to highlight the use of language for the achievement of the aesthetic, artistic, and intellectual purposes of ancient comedy, in particular for the generation of humour and comic effect, the delineation of characters, the transmission of ideological messages, and the construction of poetic meaning. The volume will be useful to scholars of ancient drama, linguists, students of humour, and scholars of Classical literature in general.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Metaphors and Personifications Onstage
• Imaginary Wor(l)ds: Comic Language and the Construction of Fantasy
• A Less Maculate Muse
• Like a Rabid Dog: Animal Metaphors and Similes in Aristophanes
• The Shop of Aristophanes the Carpenter: How Comic Poets Assembled (and Disassembled) Words
• “When He Should Have Said...” The Treatment of Humour παρ’ ὑπόνοιαν in the Aristophanic Scholia
• Rhyme in Greek Comedy
• Three Words in Aristophanes’ Wealth (999, 1037, 1083)
• Spoudaiogeloion Revisited: Homeric Text between a Scholar and a Cook
• Proper Names, Nicknames, Epithets: Aspects of Comic Language in Middle Comedy
• Strategies of Verbal Humour in Menander’s Dyskolos: From Linguistics to Dramaturgy
• List of Contributors
• Index Nominum et Rerum
• Index Locorum
• Index of Notable Greek Words and Phrases