In this chapter, I discuss the voice of the comic poet in the city and, specifically, Aristophanes. Two interrelated questions provide a focus: how does the comic poet ’speak out’ before the city? What is the role of parodic quotation in Old Comedy, the voice within the voice (’speaking out’)? I begin with some general remarks about the role of poetry in the fifth- and fourth-century Athenian democratic polis, that leads into a discussion of the institution of Old Comedy in the light of modem treatments of carnival and the idea of ’ritual reversal’. The second part of the chapter – focused on the Acharnians and the Frogs – looks first at the comic poet ’speaking out’ to the city through the parabasis in particular, and second at how the poet uses other voices, especially the voice of tragedy, in parodic quotation.

Though he was both friend and collaborator of Johann Wolfgang Goethe in Weimar, Schiller was not significantly influenced by his fellow playwright. We find no allusion in his quasi-Aristotelian definition of ‘Tragedy’ to the famous triad canonized some thirty years later by the master of Weimar: Epos, Lyrik, Drama – the ‘three natural and authentic forms of poetry’. Admittedly, Goethe was at pains to nuance his thesis precisely in relation to ‘das ältere griechische Trauerspiel’, ‘the ancient Greek tragedy’. He explained that in a first phase of development of the genre the three natural forms of poetry merged into one, inasmuch as the main character was still the chorus and the lyric mode was predominant. Later, the three forms tended to diverge and to organize themselves in sequence within individual tragedies. Goethe therefore found within the genre of tragedy the clarity of narrative epic, the exaltation of lyric emotion and the personal action of drama.

To get to the root of the grave misunderstanding underlying modern notions of the lyric mode we must revisit this chapter in the history of tragic criticism.

This chapter sets out briefly the case for seeing in the character Dicaeopolis in Acharnians not (as proposed by many) an alter ego of Aristophanes, but his competitor Eupolis, from whose political stance in his comedies Aristophanes is circumspectly distancing his own.

Chapter 5 advances the argument comedies of Aristophanes to consciously draw on the poetics of both literary and administrative catalogues. The plays contain lists that parody the archaic poetic catalogue tradition; meanwhile, in various scenarios, Aristophanic characters display a preoccupation with the listing-behaviors we have already begun to outline: counting, valuation, quantifying, and establishing authority. The comedies thus represent a deep integration of the literary and administrative spheres through their use of the inventory.