Ephippus is an outstanding playwright of Greek Middle Comedy. He won a single Lenaean victory ca. 378-376 BC and continued being productive until the late 340s. His twenty-eight surviving fragments reveal a wide thematic range: myth burlesque (with a special fondness for Heracles), political allegory, sympotic themes, personal mockery, satire of philosophy (Plato), hetairai. His corpus features seven hapax terms, as well as the highest percentage of anapaestic dimeter lines of all poets of Middle Comedy.

This work is part of the Fragmenta Comica series which aims to provide commentaries and translations to all the surviving fragments and testimonia of the comic poets of ancient Greece. This volume offers the first scholarly commentary and sustained study of several late fourth-century BCE poets of the so-called New Comedy – among them Philippides of Athens, a writer and dramatist highly esteemed in antiquity, known especially for his acrimonious clashes with Athenian demagogues and his influential friendship with foreign kings. All fragments are subject to close textual, linguistic and stylistic analysis, and are interpreted against the wider literary, social and historical background of the period. This volume will be a valuable reference work for scholars and students of ancient comedy, as well as anyone interested in ancient literature more generally and the broader historical and cultural contexts in which these texts were written.

English summary: The series 'Fragmenta Comica' will provide a complete commentary on the fragments of Greek comedy. The aim of the commentary is twofold: on the one hand, it is meant to make accessible these mostly rather challenging texts from a number of different perspectives. On the other hand, it should help in the reconstruction the plays where this is possible, as well as in achieving a literary-historical classification of the authors. The fragments and testimonia will be translated. The results obtained in the commentary will be integrated into general surveys published in the Studia Comica series: on comedy and comedy techniques such as parody and satire as well as on its political function. The project is planned to take fifteen years to complete. German summary: Die Reihe Fragmenta Comica wird die vollstandige Kommentierung der Fragmente der griechischen Komodie bieten. Ziel der Kommentare ist es, einerseits die in der Regel schwierig zu verstehenden Texte unter allen moglichen Gesichtspunkten zu erschlieaen, andererseits, wo dies moglich ist, eine Rekonstruktion der Stucke zu versuchen und eine literaturgeschichtliche Einordnung der Autoren vorzunehmen. Die Fragmente und Testimonien werden ubersetzt. Die in den Kommentaren erzielten Ergebnisse sollen in allgemeine Studien einflieaen, die in den Studia Comica veroffentlicht werden: zur Komik und komischen Techniken wie Parodie, Satire sowie zur politischen Funktion. Prof. Dr. Bernhard Zimmermann leitet die Forschungsstelle Kommentierung der Fragmente der griechischen Komodie an der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften. Die Arbeitsstelle des Projekts ist am Seminar fur Klassische Philologie der Universitat Freiburg angesiedelt. Ein Weblog berichtet aktuell uber den Fortgang des Projekts, das auf 15 Jahre ausgelegt ist. Das Projekt ist international vernetzt und arbeitet mit Zentren zur Erforschung der fragmentarisch erhaltenen griechischen Literatur in Italien, Groabritannien und den USA zusammen.

This volume is devoted to the over 200 fragments of Cratinus for which have no play title. Much of the material has never been commented on previously. Douglas Olson and Ryan Seaberg offer a close literary, philological and historical study of the fragments, with particular attention to textual, poetic and linguistic issues of all sorts and to the lexicographic sources that preserve the material. Their general goal is to open up problems and perspectives rather than to shut them down. By teasing out some of their individual puzzles and peculiarities they want to render the fragments accessible to further scholarly work. The commentary of the Fragmenta Comica series illuminate not only the genre history of comedy, but also the Greek literary history of the Classical and Hellenistic period.

From some points of view, Timocles departs from the norm of his time, and in particular from near-contemporary comedians such as Alexis, Eubulus and Antiphanes, and appears to be the most 'Aristophanic' poet of the fourth century. More specifically, in a period when political satire seems to have lost its vigor, he employs acerbic attacks against major and minor Athenian politicians. The fact that at least sixteen of the forty-two surviving fragments of his poetry contain explicit or implicit references to politicians can hardly be attributed to chance. Timocles' inventiveness and versatility are also demonstrated, inter alia, in his combination of different motifs, his association of mythical figures with contemporary personalities and his employment of a figurative language. The present volume follows the principles and structure of the commentaries of the KomFrag project. It includes an introduction on Timocles and a detailed examination and commentary of the testimonies and the surviving fragments.

A new text and commentary on one of Aristophanes' greatest and most influential plays.

The era of Old Comedy (ca. 485–ca. 380 BC), when theatrical comedy was created and established, is best known through the extant plays of Aristophanes. But the work of many other poets, including Cratinus and Eupolis, the other members, with Aristophanes, of the canonical Old Comic Triad, survives in fragments.