In Our Time - Comedy in Ancient Greek Theatre

Episode Date: July 13, 2006

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss comedy in Ancient Greek theatre including Aristophanes and Menander. In The Birds, written by Aristophanes, two Athenians seek a Utopian refuge from the madness of city life and found a city of birds located between Earth and Olympus. Unfortunately, the idealism of their perfect new City - christened (in 414 BC) 'Cloud Cuckoo Land' - becomes corrupted and its decline was portrayed by one man (the chorus) playing 24 different species of bird. In one of Aristophanes' other politically anthropomorphic plays, The Wasps, was devised as an attack on the failures of Athenian democracy. It featured a chorus of actors dressed in black and yellow stripes who swarmed the stage stinging each other. Crammed with absurd images and satirical barbs, Comic theatre was a popular art form where mass appeal and coarse humour was combined with men in drag lambasting political figures and local big wigs. And from the fifth century BC onwards, Greek comic theatre fizzed and flourished, crossing boundaries of time and space, often informed by a savage political spleen. But how did Greek comedy evolve? Why did its subsequent development differ so radically from that of Greek tragedy? To what extent did it reflect the anxieties and preoccupations of a nascent democracy? And can it be said to have left any lasting legacy? With Paul Cartledge, Professor of Greek History at the University of Cambridge; Edith Hall, Professor of Drama and Classics at Royal Holloway, University of London; Nick Lowe, Senior Lecturer in Classics at Royal Holloway, University of London.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, in the birds written by Aristophanes, two Athenians seek a utopian refuge from the madness of city life and found a city of birds, located between Earth and Olympus.

Unfortunately, the idealism of their perfect new city, christened in 414 BC as Cloud Cuckooland, is corrupted. When the birds were performed, it featured a chorus which represented 24 different species of birds. One of Aristophanes' other politically anthropomorphic plays, the Wasps, which was devised as an attack on the failures of Athenian democracy, featured a chorus of actors dressed in black and yellow stripes, who swarmed the stage, stinging each other. From the 5th century BC onwards,

Greek comedy fizzed and flourished across boundaries of time and space, often informed by a savage political spleen. But how did Greek comedy evolve? Why did its subsequent development differ so radically from that of Greek tragedy? To what extent did it reflect anxieties and preoccupations of a nascent democracy and can it be said to have had any lasting legacy? With me to discuss Greek comedy are Paul Cartilage, Professor of Greek History at the University of Cambridge,

Edith Hall, Professor of Drama and Classics at Royal Holloway College, and Nick Lowe, Senior Lecturer in Classics at Royal Holloway College and the University of London. Paul Cartley, what's the earliest evidence of the comic genre in Greece? Well, I think you're asking about the comic genre, but if you're asking about comedy, that goes right back to Homer. And lovely scene in the Odyssey of Aphrodite in bed with the god of war, the gods find them and laugh.

And Greek laughter is often not terribly pleasant. Greeks laugh in an unpleasant way. But the origins of the genre of comedy go back, little less far to, in particular, Archilochus and Hipponax, two guys who wrote Iambic, which is a nasty form of sort of flighting, antipersonal, antipersonnel verses. And as far as the genre is concerned, we're really a bit in the dark. We've got scenes on vases showing men in costume, maybe in bird costume, choruses. In other words, you've got choruses.

We know people got drunk and went on riots and revels. And the Greek for a riot or a rout or a revel is comos. And the Greek for a song is an ode. So Komodea is a combination of rioting and routing and singing. But of course, it helps also to drink. And that's where the god Dionysus comes in who invented the vine. And so, as I say, we really don't know precisely how this gets formalized. But those are the ingredients in the brew.

But when it gets formalised, it comes into our ken, as it were, in a most spectacular way. Greeks from many parts of the Mediterranean come every year to Athens for a number of days. And for five days, then reduced to three days. There's this competition between dramatists. 15,000 of them at least are in the audience. Can you just tell us about the scale of it and why it was on such a scale?

You're talking about the main drama festival, the so-called Great or City Dionysia. There were other drama festivals, and there were other festivals of Dionysus, but the big one at Athens is formalized by about 500 BC, I believe, and I believe it's also formalized in a democratic way. I think there's a specific link. Not all my colleagues share that view.

And immediately, originally, it's tragedy that is the genre, that is the dominant dramatic form, we're attached to it, slightly oddly, a form of drama called a satire or satir drama, where the chorus is composed of satas, partly men, partly animal, and these are followers of Dionysus, so there's a specifically Dianisiac element,

but comedy is not introduced into this festival for some 20 years or so after the origins of it as a democratic drama festival of tragedy and satra drama. Is this the first sign of evidence that it was regarded as rather inferior to tragedy? I think comic poets and Aristophanes would be a good illustration of that had a certain inferiority complex. And one reason we have parat tragedy in comedy, that is parody of tragedy, not paracomedy in tragedy, though Euripides went a little bit in that direction,

is that indeed comic poets did feel that they were, as it were, the junior branch of the dramatic profession. Actually, they were a completely different type of drama. Can you expand on how different they were, Edith Hall? How would you characterize their difference? In purely theatrical terms, the most important difference is that comedy is very, very participatory. The characters address the audience.

Audience members can get involved in the action. there's very little boundary between the world of the stage and the world of the characters on it. In tragedy, you've got an incredibly closed-off world in the past where you're actually spectating at something. But I think most people, if you bust in a busload of people

from the National Theatre today, straight from the Littleton or the Olivier and shoved them in there. The thing they really would notice is the obscenity. I have to say it. Aristophanes, a minute you go into the theatre to see old comedy, you'll be seeing large, padded, obscene, grotesque bodies.

You'll have seen padded stuff, boobs, and you'll see huge, grotesque sort of comic masks, and you all have had very, very highly skilled comic actors coming out with absolute streams. They've seen by tuperation, and you certainly didn't get that in tragedy. Why do your academics call this old comedy? We call it old comedy because the ancient Greeks called it old comedy, not actually in the time of Aristophanes, but as soon as they invented something different, they did call that the newer or new comedy. and invented a schematization into the old stuff they used to do,

just as we might say old plays like Shakespeare and then modern plays like Arthur Miller or something like that. I have read about it being particularly savage with its political bite. Can you illustrate that? It is savage, but it's only really savage about one or two groups of people within Athenian society. If Aristophanes really didn't like a particular, politician and his particular policies and strategies, then he went hell to leather. And his arch

enemy was a citizen leader called Cleon, who was, if we are to believe, Aristophanes and Aravese jumped up, aspirant, low, middle class, incredibly uncultured Yob, who simply wanted to lead Athens into ever more increasingly disastrous wars. Of course, we haven't got Cleon to answer back. But when he didn't like somebody, then he He just absolutely went for them sexually exposed their sexual habits on stage. He did things as bad as any cartoon you'll find in a modern newspaper and worse. And no recourse to the laws of libel? Oh, absolutely. Cleon, according to Aristophanes, and again, we haven't got the other side of the argument,

is said to have actually taken Aristophanes to court or tried to on more than one occasion, once for bringing the actual democracy into disrepute. And the other time, it's rather more vague, I think. It's more sort of personal libelous action. There were laws that they could take recourse to. I suspect that of Ariasofanis had ever got into court against Cleon. You'd have had the most scintillating speeches in prosecution and defence that Athens had ever heard. Can we go back to Paul, or between the two of you, before I turn to Nick,

this business of linking it with the arrival of democracy, can you just develop that a little bit? Because I think our listeners will be interested in that. It's almost a curious connection. Well, it's partly a chronological coincidence. In other words, what most of us think is the origins of Athenian democracy happen, round about 500. Drama festival is organised

round about 500. Athens becomes extremely politically and militarily successful. The particular issue over which Athens develops in both those directions is the Persians. Persians want to conquer Greece. Athens is public enemy number one

because they helped some of their Greek comrades to rise up against. to Persia and so Persia is going to punish them. And they lose the Battle of Marathon and so they come back again, huge force in 480 BC. And what effect this house is that since the Athenians, together with the Spartans, win, since Athens is a democracy, this gives a great Philip to the masses, the ordinary people of Athens. So you have a system of direct popular rule which expresses itself in all sorts of ways, and religion is a principal way in which politics is done in ancient

Greece. The Dionysia is a religious festival, and drama is incorporated into it, and had been for some time before the Persian Wars. So, Nicola, the idea of these 15,000, some have said 17,000 people turning up, is to do with, because of a religious festival, and yet they don't seem, in the slightest bit, to be a religious play. This is the paradox. This is one of the reasons why this mysterious sister genre of Satter play is in the program because it seems to the Athenians to have, as the saying, went nothing to do with Dionysus. But Dionysus, the god of theatre, the god of wine, the god of performance in all kinds of different versions, is very present in the world of comedy to an extent that he isn't, to anything like the same degree in tragedy. And it's just one

of the many ways in which the theatrical universes of comedy and tragedy, are remarkably different and yet exist in a strangely symbiotic relationship. The festival itself... Why can I just take it? Because when I was reading for this programme, and that struck me very strongly. There's one exception seems to be Euripides, but he is alone in that, in being an exceptionist, I understand you.

In bringing Dionysus onto the stage in the back of the... Yes, so Dionysus was a very common character in comic plots, although only one of the surviving plays happens to be centred on him. He was one of the comedy's favourite. very characters. He's there in some tragedies, Europeanese backy is the famous one, but the satir play was brought in precisely because these half human, half animal, mythological creatures in the entourage of Dionysus,

the satyrs who make up the chorus, gave Dionysus a kind of permanent presence in that bit of the festival. I'm still puzzled with Paul's view that this was an expression of a religious impulse and a democratic impulse. I mean, I'm trying to care. I mean, I couldn't dream of catching you guys out. But still, why we were, why, these comic plays, which as we read them are comic plays, burlesques, as Edith has already pointed out, and we'll go back to them and they cover our breath.

Berlesques, pantomimic, vicious, libelous, satis and so on. What they've got to do with the religious pulse? Well, as Paul says, the religious and the civic are much more closely intertwined in 5th century Athenian culture than we find easy to imagine. And on one level they are religious festivals, but they are also and equally big civic gatherings, as I think has been said within the walls of the studio earlier in the year. This was the largest single assemblage of citizens anywhere in the Athenian calendar.

The city Dionysia was the big occasion when the city got together and looked at its achievements, not just a bunch of plays, but all kinds of other forms of more civic and more religious kinds of display were part of the programme. Just add in peacetime as opposed to in war, when of course more Athenians might be all gathered together, unfortunately, in one place. Edithol, where did the competitive element come from and what did it give to the occasion? Because these players were competing with each other. There was a prize at the end. Large sums of money were given by wealthy donors.

They looked after the actors sometimes housed them for six or nine months. and the state subsidised the seating and so on. The Greeks turned absolutely everything they could into a competition. It isn't just festivals of drama at festivals of Dionysus. In the Odyssey, we hear of competitions in mowing wheat fields. Whatever they did, they wanted to compete in it. And that is, they had a word for it. It's agone.

It's actually what we got our word agony from, and it's something that is incredibly difficult and incredible struggle. It's also the same word actually for a performance in ancient Greek. So I'm actually never surprised particularly by that. I do suspect this goes back to a chat called Pysistratus, who is tyrant of Athens in the century before democracy, who did have a lot to do with the foundation of the drama festivals at the dynasty before they went democratic.

And I suspect that he is the one that we should associate with turning it into something like an Olympic event where people had first and second and third place and so on. The Greeks just loved it. much more like you to go and see three plays if they knew there was going to be a prize winner and lots of hatred. Sorry, Nick. Nick, Lou. And it does mean that our concept of a play doesn't map terribly well onto the experience of a play that the ancient world has. Because most of these plays were as one-off events in space and time as an athletic performance. The idea that you could perform a play more than once is one that's very slow to be taken up.

It's almost as though you were to think of running the same race and winning it again twice in succession. The last is as I understand it, Paul Carle, is about a couple of hours. Can you give us some idea of the dimension of the play and what went into the putting of it on? All the various dimensions from the very beginning. Well, right at the very beginning of the Athenian Civil Year, one of the very first things that was done by any official

was the Archon who was in charge of the festival. The Archon means the... the ruler literally, the official actually chosen by lot, and he was called the eponymous, Sarkon. He looked after the festival of Dionysus, and so he chose a bunch of people who would fund the various plays that were going to be put on about six to eight months later. Was this an honour or a penalty to be chosen to fund the plays? It was a huge honour and also a penalty, not the most expensive that you might have to perform, the most expensive was equipping a warship for a year.

There were about a hundred such. We call them liturgies. Our word liturgy comes ultimately from this Greek word means a service for the people, a work for the people. Leos is people in ancient Athenian. And so he appoints chorus masters Cori Goy, who fund the various playwrights. And the performance is the culmination of,

I would guess, an interactive process whereby the actors' to meet the playwright and then the chorus master says, well, I think you could probably do it a bit differently. And according to Aristotovnius, at any rate, the meanness or on the contrary, the lavishness of the chorus payer, the paymaster, could make a difference to success. And what these playwrights want is success, because as Edith says, it's deeply competitive. And though there was a second prize and a third prize, in effect, you didn't want to get either of those. picks there were no seconds or thirds, just gold medals. They didn't have a... So, I mean, the Greeks were fiercely competitive. So this is a long process.

Can we get to the plays themselves? No, I'm not rushing it. I'm just switching it around, so everybody gets a... Edith, can you tell us to the play itself? I've heard about costumes, and the listeners have all heard about costumes already. Were these actors, actors, or were they just chosen to be actors for that year? Were they already professional actors? And what did they do in their spare time? And did you... What did they do in their, what's the day job? So where are we? Well, this actually links, the question of the actors does link in very well to the democratic nature of the beast. Because what you have is a very small number of highly skilled specialist acting families,

in fact, theatre families who both wrote the plays and acted in them. And that would be your sort of family profession. And they seem to have been fairly well up the social scale. And it was not something that you did if you were. from the lowest free class at all. They were professionals, and that's what they did, and they could afford to, and they just did nothing very much all year

except get ready for the dynasty, unless they had to go off and fight as a hot plight. The choruses, however, were amateurs, and this is where the true democratic nature of the plays lies. It's that ordinary people, probably young men of sort of military service age, in large numbers, came to perform in the choruses every year. Practically everybody in that audience

will either have actually been in a chorus at the Dianistina himself as a young man or his son will be in it. We're talking about men, men, men, aren't we? We are totally talking about men, men, men on the stage, men in the audience, men subsidising it. But just possibly, if you were about 95-year-old menopausal priestess of Athena, I think you might have made the front row. But that would have been just about the best possible chance.

Otherwise, we are very definitely talking men. There's a line in the birds where the chorus say, isn't it fantastic to have wings because you can fly away from the theatre to your neighbourhood and have sex with your neighbour's wife knowing for well that he is actually safely in the theatre? Now I think that's evidence that all the wives were safely at home in the neighbourhood. Nicola Aristophanes is regarded as the most successful comic writer

between 425 and 388 BC and what most characterise his plays he was the biggest prize winners we understand he was the man. We've only 11 of his 40 plays with us, but that affirms his reputation. Well, Aristophanes belonged to a new generation of

comic playwrights who emerged in the 420s and in various ways rejuvenated the genre, moved it into several directions it was going to continue to develop on the 4th century. But what is particularly striking about Aristophanes is

his skill at dramatizing ideas. He's very good at taking a premise and finding a way of turning it into a drama of conflict around characters. So you might not think that rhetoric is something you could easily write a play about. But if you turn it into a conflict between a father and a son in the same family, harassed by debt, with the father trying to use the new arts of rhetoric to argue his way out of paying his creditors, finding that he can't master them, but his son can. Then you've got the

potential, as happens in the clouds, you've got the potential for an extraordinary powerful play of extraordinarily recognisable kinds of tension. And all of our stuff in these plays are built around ideas in a way that makes them very chewy.

They tend to be plays of fantasy that take the real world and make one little twist to the logic and through that take us off into a realm where ideas can be played out in bizarre and quite often surreal ways.

I know Paul Cartlidge, we're talking about fragmentary evidence a great deal of the time. In fact, Aristophanes' rivals, who are mentioned, and no plays around. So why does that leave you as a scholar with the status of Aristotphan? Well, we can only deal with what we've got, can't we say? I mean, there are very skilled people who can make a great deal out of a little, but nevertheless, you have to say,

when we say old comedy, we mean Aristotophon. When we say Greek comedy, we almost mean only Aristotovina's and Menander. But we'll come on maybe to Menander later on. So the fact of it is that if you just don't have three quarters of a man's herb, you cannot state certain things with confidence, for example, about development. On the other hand, it so happens, and this is purely coincidental, that the works we do have span his entire whirv. There are gaps, but nevertheless we have the beginning, we have the middle,

and we have the end of Aristophanes. It seemed to divide into three groups, Edith Hall, peace, fantasy and women. Can you give us an example of the fantasy play? You opened the show with probably the greatest fantasy play of all, which is where to disenchanted citizens, disenchanted with all sorts of things, the level of rent and the sort of electricity bill level of life in Athens,

decide to go off and found a new city in the sky with the birds, cloud cuckoo land, which means that the whole play takes place, in the upper air. And to my mind, the most thrilling thing about Aristophanes and the thing that he has placed in the sort of imagination of the West, which you can find leading all the way to science fiction is this otherworldly journey.

And to have the stage turned into somewhere completely different. In the frogs, the frogs... We're talking about use of cranes, we're talking about. Are there 24 birds in costume, bird costume, we assume they're extremely elaborate. Are they representing 24 different politicians or 24 different shapes? of ideas of idea. What are they representing?

I think they may well be representing 24 different types of familiar stereotype of citizen rather than particular citizens, you know, the Twitterer, the bossy one, the misanthrope, the different typologies. The frogs is my second favourite, is

very similar, except that where you go is to the underworld and you stage his fantastic journey down to meet dead people. I mean, that's a sort of time travel. That's a way of dealing with time travel, like in Dr. Who or something, because you go to meet dead poets. And the eponymous frogs of the title, of course,

to my mind, the best stunt in all of comedy in world theatre is Dionysus, the god of theatre, cannot row over the river to get down to the underworld because he's harassed by this chorus of croaking frogs singing pop music. All right, it was new music. And the idea, I mean, I would laugh to be there to watch a bunch of Athenian citizens in frog outfits It's singing the equivalent of rap.

Just thrilling. But it's that imagination, the surreal quality that Nick was talking about, that seems to me to have been his great genius. And it's that that has come through. Forget the future of comedy. Forget sitcom. Think about Jonathan Swift. Think about Gulliver's travels and think about Star Trek.

What about the piece plays, Paul? Sure. Well, I was going to go on with what Edith was saying, would she not consider certain of the women plays fantasy, plays. In other words, your categorisation into three, notice we keep coming back to threes, is to be blurred, a bit.

But police plays, well, they, there again, this is another issue. There's one play called peace, and why is it called peace? Not because of the abstract quality piece, but because of the goddess piece. She gives her name to the play, which is a very good sort of illustration of the nature of Greek thought, that they abstracted

qualities, but they then personalised them. And in this case, of course, in a sense, Aristophanes makes joke, she's, of course, on stage, and she has a most beautiful attendant. And the hero of the play, who's an ordinary Athenian. Two, one of the material he's particularly smitten with, and he, his name means the vintner, something like that, he's the vine dresser, and he goes up to rescue her because, of course, the nasty old other gods have got her imprisoned, which is why the Athenians are at war

the whole time. If she was free, then they'd have peace. but actually he wrote it as he knew that the Athenians were very soon within a few weeks to make peace with Sparta. So it's not a play aiming to achieve peace. It's a celebration, but it's more of a humorous celebration of peace. So we're talking about something with a very strong journalistic element. So you're having to lean back to an half thousand years and pick up topical references from your fragments. Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, the irony is that we tried to write history of politics from,

i.e. politics in day-to-day sense, what happens in the House of Commons, from Aristophanes. And a very gifted German scholar, Victor Ehrenberg, wrote a whole book, People of Aristophanes, a social history of Athens solely on the basis, well, almost solely, of Aristophanes, not just the whole plays, but the fragments as well. And really, it can't be done because it begs the question of what is the reality, that the humour is bouncing off. But another very famous... I want to come to Nick Lowe here

and talk about... I mean, going sort of counterculture around this table. Ask Nick to talk about Lizzie Strata is probably his best known play. Can you remind us of the plot and then tell us why you think this is such a lasting and important play? It's certainly the play

which has had the most interesting theatrical history in the 20th century and it's a later play than the other so-called peace plays. it belongs to a later stage in the war. What happens in it is that the women of Athens get together, take over the Acropolis and

launch a sex strike, which refuses their menfolk access to their favours until the men will negotiate a peace treaty between Athens and Sparta and the Allies. And it's one of those plots which has resonance way

outside its original political context. Although I think Aristophanes would not recognize some of those contexts terribly readily. It also happens, although this is an element which has got completely lost to our view, it happens to capture a moment, as so often with Aristottenes plays, a moment in Athenian history just before the news breaks, because this was a time when there was a coup d'etard, the overthrow of the democracy being already plotted,

and Aristotovans as so often seems just a few months ahead of the headlines. But it is interesting, given what Edith Hall, were saying a few minutes ago, but the absence of women from the play, they weren't acting in the plays, they went watching the plays, and so on, that this is a comedy with a woman's name, there's a title, about women, and can you just explore that a bit?

Because that's fascinating. Well, as far as we know, it was the first. Aristophanes... The tragedies had had women's men. Absolutely. The tragedies had always been seen by the comedians as rather girly because they allow men to dress up as women and be taken seriously.

and actually lead feminized emotional lives in front of 15,000 citizens. And in 4-11, Harastophonies has this brilliant idea that comedy can do things with women as well. It's quite difficult to do because this is not the women of myth. It's the women of the contemporary world. Comedy exploits its licence to talk about the here and now. So these are your wives he's making jokes about. And that's quite an uncomfortable theme to explore with opinion in male.

Because there had been Hattaira, that is, prostitute plays before. And we have the citizen women play. Sorry, Nick Pischoff, and then I'd like Editha to come on on, on this, rather. So what he does is that he comes up with a way of, he comes up with a stereotype of the citizen housewife, which is exploitable for comic purposes. But he borrows from tragedy,

particularly from Euripidian heroines, to create this character of Lysistrita, who embodies a set of strengths, which he cleverly assimilates to the, those of his traditional male leads. And then he falls so in love with the idea of building a comedy about women that he does it again in his next play a few weeks later. Edith Hall, do you like to over what this is true?

Well, I feel very ambivalent about this play, as I'm sure my colleagues won't be surprised to hear. I think it should be said straight away that one of the most exciting inscriptions, bits of stone with writing on, to have been discovered in the 20th century, showed that the actual priestess of Athena in Athens, the real live priestess of Athena,

the most important woman in Athens, was actually called something that sounds very, similar, Lyce Simmakei, which means the woman who resolves or gets rid of battles, whereas Lysistrata means the woman who gets rid of the army. So I think that there is a real character lying behind this. And Lysistrata herself is a wonderful character. She's not sleazy, she's not an alcoholic, she's not obsessed with cucumber patches, and she doesn't keep trying to run away back home in order to have some sex. Unfortunately, all the other women are. And I think Aristophanes, you can say he's discovered how wonderful it is to have a serious female hero.

female hero, great. The trouble is he's also discovered just how funny drag acts are. And the whole humour of Lysistrata on any stage rests on the admitted hilarity of a grown man dressed up as a woman. And I think that the transvestite act is one of the great legacies of Aristophanes to the West, right through to Lily Savage and so on. That is pure Aristotaphne.

Does this lessen it in your eyes, lessen its important significance, value is applying? No, I think it's an extraordinarily valuable play because I know about the background history of it, which is that just two years before, an unprecedented number of young men had died an unbelievably horrible death in Sicily. Athens had lost its almost entire generation of young men's soldiers.

What was this unbelievable, horrible death? We call it the Sicilian disaster. The imperial mission of Athens had gone a bit too far, and the Athenians got caught out trying to take over what was then a bread basket. Sicily was a very important place for all kinds of reasons to do with grain supply. But they got caught out and they were wiped out. I mean, an entire generation.

And there's one line in the Lysistrata where one of the women says, we even hear the few men left in Athens say there isn't a man left anywhere. So I think you've actually got a real crisis of manpower going on and you've got a lot of tears being shed and a hugely disproportionate number of women in the city. So I think that makes me cry, actually. That's not comedy. I think from that point of view, it's a tragedy.

There are moments in the play where the jokes stop and you could actually hear the silence and the pathosal resonates. It's a very strange play for Rastophonians. Well, I can ask you a rather difficult question because given the overwhelming majority of us, that is, not us, do not speak ancient Greek, and you have, you have fragmentary evidence and so on and so forth.

Can you give us some notion of Aristophani's language? And, well, I'm just going to leave it there. It's up to you now. Before I say anything, I should make it quite clear that few of us and possibly none of us speak ancient Greek, still, sadly. Why is that? We don't know how it sounded, is one thing. But you read?

We read, we read, yeah, fluently. at sight, bedtime reading. But Aristophanes was a master of language. That's to say dialect, as well as all kinds of different forms of grammar and syntax. And people have done work on him from a dialectal point of view. He uses mock dialect, for example, fake Persian. Well, we know that's fake Persian. But when he makes a guy speak Biotian, which is, shall we say, like Scots,

I mean, this is one of these terrible things that one does. Then people have worked on this and yes, he gets it right. When he makes a Spartan speak Spartan, she gets her Spartan dialect, correct. So he's brilliant in that way. But to me, and I'm not a literary person at all in any serious way, I'm just as impressed at his lyric poetry. Some of, for example, the hoopoe, we were talking about the birds. It's absolutely famous.

The 200 lines or so of the hoopo's song is just wonderful verse. no idea what it sounded like because it was of course sung to an accompaniment. I was going to say, Aristophanes was not only, he didn't only write the libretto, as it were, but he wrote the book.

And he, not only the book, but the libretto, but he also did the choreography and the blocking and all that sort of stuff. Would this plays be sung then? Yeah, well, Ediths Moore and Nick would be more able to tell you about that, but different characters in different parts of the play sing in different ways.

Some don't sing at all, and that's very relevant. I mean, slaves, for example, are not allowed to sing. Are we talking about early operas, early musicals, either? No, but you are talking about early Joan Littlewood. You're talking about musical, political review. I really do think, oh,

what a lovely war is the best way for somebody to get some kind of sense of what it was like to be at an Arisdavan trip piece play. So where you use popular songs, tunes that I think, he often used tunes that people probably already knew from drinking parties and different kinds of... There are references to particular songs.

I think you had to sing along. I'm sure you did at old comedy. You had this very, very participatory audience. What is very interesting about the individual actors, you've either got three or four, and there's a lot of controversy about whether you can do mask change to survive with just three actors, and whether you need four or not.

But I get a very strong sense reading the texts in the Greek, which I do from time to time, that Aristophanes is writing for individual stars, actors with particular talents. Some of them never sing. Tragayas, the man the vintner in peace, has got a 250 line crane ride at the beginning, that's his stunt, which took the most extraordinary athleticism during which he has to sing high operatic arias. It's Pavarotti on horseback, on a crane, as you're a dung beetle bag, yelling from the top of the thing. So he takes his actor and he actually designs a role, just as if I was writing for Lily Savage, I would write a very

different kind of comic role than if I was writing for June Witt. And you can actually get a feel off the text of the actors' talents, whether he was a drag actor, a physical actor, an absurdist actor, or more of a dialectical one, yes. Can I just bring us to the word masks, which we've omitted, and I think we ought to bring this

into the conversation. Can you tell us about everybody was masked and what function? Is this partly to do with the fact that they had to reach 15,000 to people, raked up in front of them. It was easier to see an expression on a mask than an expression on a face. Yes, although tragedy and comedy use the mask

in very different ways. Tragedies masks are very naturalistic, they're dignified, comedy's masks are cartoon-like, they have exaggerated, bulbous features. And you could tell, even with the sound-off, which kind of play you were watching just from looking at the heads

of the performers. But obviously, you can't do close-ups in a theatre on that kind of scale. So what you have instead is this really, rather sophisticated performance instrument, which can convey a range of expressions, by the way the play of light and shadow operates over it, particularly if you've got exaggerated bulbous type features.

You can incline it in different ways to the open-air light source of the sunshine and create the illusion of changing expression in a way that seems to have been practised in quite sophisticated ways. What we're talking about Greek common is I understand it, in effect we're talking about Aristophanes, you said, but also Menander. So let's move to Menander.

He's about 100 years later. Indeed. Paul College, can you take us into Menander and what his place and significance is? Yeah, born in the 340s, so about 40 years after Aristophanes died. And an Athenian citizen said to be a pupil of Theophrastus,

who was the successor of Aristotle as head of the Lyceum philosophy and other school. So very well-educated man. And he is heir to the change that has come over comedy at the very end of Aristophanes but particularly in the 30 years between 380 and 350

sometimes called middle comedy if you have an old and you have a new you have to have a middle in an early middle and late and so on you can't do without three is quite much and some people think that there's no such thing really as middle comedy but it's a comedy of situation

and a comedy of stereotype and a comedy of I'm afraid rape seems to feature extremely strongly to enable the plot to move along. Sorry, just a second. Is this in Menanda? We're talking all about Menanda. Yeah, absolutely.

So everything you've just said then applies to him? It does. So can you give us the principal differences between Menander's comedy and Aristotel? Right. Well, formally speaking, the chorus has virtually disappeared and so you might have some musical interludes. You have a five-act drama

with the intermissions between each act marked by music, but you don't any longer have the integrated musical theatre that we were talking about in the case of Aristophanes and Joan Littlewood. And he doesn't do political comedy, though he's living actually at a very, he does, I mean a bit, but it's not marked in the way that Aristophanes is. And he's yet living at an extraordinary interesting time because it's just when Athens ceases to be a democracy and also ceases to be a seriously important individual political entity because it's absorbed in the wider post-Alexander the great world. Edithol, what's the significance of this change?

If you want to sort of point it up a little bit more, that would be fine, then tell us what you think is significant about it. Well, it clearly is a form of comedy that suits a state that isn't democratic anymore. Its obsession is the private household. It's usually about one or two households into. marrying and the central heroes, the whole experience is about trauma within his family, his relationship with his son, his relationship with his son's girlfriend, the identity and paternity of some poor little baby that's been found exposed somewhere. The whole heart and soul of it

has shifted from the city-state, from being a civic collective matter for all citizens, to being the shared private light that we all have, but that is endlessly repeated in our households. Now this seems to me to be entirely suited to post-Alexander, post-democratic Athens, which no longer has the same kind of rumbustious dissent institutionalised. And also, exactly, it's exportable. Menander gets performed in cities across the entire Greek-speaking world that now spreads from virtually India to North Africa. It's an exportable comedy that can be performed by only three people,

three actors, can learn those parts and travel in little troops, and we know that they start up at this time. It's a completely different kind of phenomenon. What's happened to the chorus, Nicola? Well, the chorus has become physically separated from the actors. As the actors have grown in stature have become more celebrities, they've also been raised in stature physically on a stage which is now on a completely different level from the chorus.

So they can't actually interact with the chorus at all. And that means that the chorus has been reduced to doing little musical numbers when the actors aren't hogging the show. This now leads to a chorus. which simply comes on and goes off again and doesn't appear in the scripts of the play at all. It's the origin, in fact,

because the resources were standardized at four choruses per play, four choruses per play, four choruses per play, it divides the play for the first time in Western literary history into five acts, and that's where it all comes from. The thing that needs saying about Menander, of course, is that his legacy

vastly outstrips that of Aristophanes. Aristophanes plays had dropped from the performance repertoire within a generation of his death, probably quite a lot earlier than that. And it's Menander's plays that, for the rest of antiquity, represented the golden age of comedy. Menander and his contemporaries. Menander himself, actually, not a big hit in his own lifetime,

becomes very big in the second century BC. And it's the plays of Menander, the classic age of comedy, that the Romans translate. And these, of course, are the classical comedies that make it into the medieval and Renaissance Western tradition and become the models for classical comedy ever after. So the direct line from Menander through Ploters to Shakespeare to today. And the irony of it.

Molière. Molière is probably the most familiar sort of model. Well, what a way to go. That's the end of the series. And this series, we're back in September, back to the Greeks with a vengeance. Thank you very much, Niccolo, Edith Hall and Paul Cartledge. As I said, we're back in September, and thank you very much for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast.

You can find hundreds of other programs about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com. UK forward slash radio four.