This study analyzes how the structure of ancient Greek comedy betrays and responds to cultural tensions in the society of the classical city-state. Individual chapters treat Aristophanic and Menandrean comedies.

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This book provides a unique panorama of this challenging area of Greek literature, combining literary perspectives with historical issues and material culture.

This book explores the social institutions, the prevailing social values, and the ideology of the ancient city-state as revealed in Roman Comedy. "The very essence of comedy is social," writes David Konstan, "and in the complex movement of its plots we may be able to discern the lineaments and contradictions of the reigning ideas of an age." David Konstan looks closely at eight plays: Plautus's Aulularia, Asinaria, Captivi, Rudens, Cistellaria, and Truculentus, and Terence's Phormio and Hecyra. Offering new interpretations of each, he develops a "typology of plot forms" by analyzing structural features and patterns of conventional behavior in the plays, and he relates the results of his literary analysis to contemporary social conditions. He argues that the plays address tensions that were potentially disruptive to the ancient city-state, and that they tended to resolve these tensions in ways that affirmed traditional values. Roman Comedy is an innovative and challenging book that will be welcomed by students of classical literature, ancient social history, the history of the theater, and comedy as a genre.

In one of his last books, Socrates and Aristophanes, Leo Strauss's examines the confrontation between Socrates and Aristophanes in Aristophanes' comedies. Looking at eleven plays, Strauss shows that this confrontation is essentially one between poetry and philosophy, and that poetry emerges as an autonomous wisdom capable of rivaling philosophy. "Strauss gives us an impressive addition to his life's work—the recovery of the Great Tradition in political philosophy. The problem the book proposes centers formally upon Socrates. As is typical of Strauss, he raises profound issues with great courage. . . . [He addresses] a problem that has been inherent in Western life ever since [Socrates'] execution: the tension between reason and religion. . . . Thus, we come to Aristophanes, the great comic poet, and his attack on Socrates in the play The Clouds. . . [Strauss] translates it into the basic problem of the relation between poetry and philosophy, and resolves this by an analysis of the function of comedy in the life of the city." —Stanley Parry, National Review

Reproducing Athens examines the role of romantic comedy, particularly the plays of Menander, in defending democratic culture and transnational polis culture against various threats during the initial and most fraught period of the Hellenistic Era. Menander's romantic comedies--which focus on ordinary citizens who marry for love--are most often thought of as entertainments devoid of political content. Against the view, Susan Lape argues that Menander's comedies are explicitly political. His nationalistic comedies regularly conclude by performing the laws of democratic citizen marriage, thereby promising the generation of new citizens. His transnational comedies, on the other hand, defend polis life against the impinging Hellenistic kingdoms, either by transforming their representatives into proper citizen-husbands or by rendering them ridiculous, romantic losers who pose no real threat to citizen or city. In elaborating the political work of romantic comedy, this book also demonstrates the importance of gender, kinship, and sexuality to the making of democratic civic ideology. Paradoxically, by championing democratic culture against various Hellenistic outsiders, comedy often resists the internal status and gender boundaries on which democratic culture was based. Comedy's ability to reproduce democratic culture in scandalous fashion exposes the logic of civic inclusion produced by the contradictions in Athens's desperately politicized gender system. Combining careful textual analysis with an understanding of the context in which Menander wrote, Reproducing Athens profoundly changes the way we read his plays and deepens our understanding of Athenian democratic culture.

Investigates the construction of democratic ideology in Classical Athens through a study of the social memory of Athens' mythical pastProposes a novel approach to Athenian democratic ideology that opens new frontiers of investigation in ancient history and the social sciencesThe introduction clearly sets out the aims and methodology of the book and its place within the scholarship in ancient history and the social sciencesFour case studies illuminate the impact of Athenian democratic institutions on ideology, myth, and the use of social memoryOffers a long-awaited new interpretation of the Athenian funeral oration for the war deadOffers clear overviews of Athenian democratic institutions (e.g., Assembly, Council, lawcourts) based on the most recent scholarshipProvides up-to-date overviews of several values in Greek thought (e.g., charis, hybris, eugeneia)The debate on Athenian democratic ideology has long been polarised around two extremes. A Marxist tradition views ideology as a cover-up for Athens' internal divisions. Another tradition, sometimes referred to as culturalist, interprets it neutrally as the fixed set of ideas shared by the members of the Athenian community. Matteo Barbato addresses this dichotomy by providing a unitary approach to Athenian democratic ideology. Analysing four different myths from the perspective of the New Institutionalism, he demonstrates that Athenian democratic ideology was a fluid set of ideas, values and beliefs shared by the Athenians as a result of a constant ideological practice influenced by the institutions of the democracy. He shows that this process entailed the active participation of both the mass and the elite and enabled the Athenians to produce multiple and compatible ideas about their community and its mythical past.