Ancient Greek comedy

Ancient Greek comedy was one of the final three principal dramatic forms in the theatre of classical Greece (the others being tragedy and the satyr play). Athenian comedy is conventionally divided into three periods, Old Comedy, Middle Comedy, and New Comedy. Old Comedy survives today largely in the form of the eleven surviving plays of Aristophanes, while Middle Comedy is largely lost, i.e. preserved only in relatively short fragments by authors such as Athenaeus of Naucratis. New Comedy is known primarily from the substantial papyrus fragments of Menander.

The philosopher Aristotle wrote in his Poetics (c. 335 BC) that comedy is a representation of laughable people and involves some kind of blunder or ugliness which does not cause pain or disaster.C. A. Trypanis wrote that comedy is the last of the great species of poetry Greece gave to the world.

Periods

The Alexandrine grammarians, and most likely Aristophanes of Byzantium in particular, seem to have been the first to divide Greek comedy into what became the canonical three periods: Old Comedy (ἀρχαία archaia), Middle Comedy (μέση mese) and New Comedy (νέα nea). These divisions appear to be largely arbitrary, and ancient comedy almost certainly developed constantly over the years.

Ancient Greek

Ancient Greek includes the forms of Greek used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around the 9th century BCE to the 6th century CE. It is often roughly divided into the Archaic period (9th to 6th centuries BCE), Classical period (5th and 4th centuries BCE), and Hellenistic period (3rd century BCE to 6th century CE). It is antedated in the second millennium BCE by Mycenaean Greek.

The language of the Hellenistic phase is known as Koine (common), while the language from the late period onward features no considerable differences from Medieval Greek. Koine is regarded as a separate historical stage of its own, although in its earlier form, it closely resembled the Classical. Prior to the Koine period, Greek of the classic and earlier periods included several regional dialects.

Ancient Greek was the language of Homer and of classical Athenian historians, playwrights, and philosophers. It has contributed many words to English vocabulary and has been a standard subject of study in educational institutions of the West since the Renaissance. This article primarily contains information about the Epic and Classical phases of the language.

Greek tragedy

Greek tragedy is a form of theatre from Ancient Greece and Asia Minor. It reached its most significant form in Athens in the 5th century BC, the works of which are sometimes called Attic tragedy. Greek tragedy is an extension of the ancient rites carried out in honor of Dionysus, and it heavily influenced the theatre of Ancient Rome and the Renaissance. Tragic plots were most often based upon myths from the oral traditions of archaic epics. In tragic theatre, however, these narratives were presented by actors. The most acclaimed Greek tragedians are Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides.

Etymology

Aristotelian hypothesis

The origin of the word tragedy has been a matter of discussion from ancient times. Our primary source of knowledge on the question is the Poetics of Aristotle. Aristotle was able to gather first-hand documentation from theater performance in Attica, which is inaccessible to scholars today. His work is therefore invaluable for the study of ancient tragedy, even if his testimony is open to doubt on some points.

Greek

Greek may refer to:

Greece

Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: