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The most famous Athenian comic dramatist was Aristophanes (c.446-386 BCE). His plays Frogs, Wasps, Clouds and others remain the most well known of ancient comedies.
In his plays, Aristophanes launched scathing attacks on the prominent figures of Athens at the time, mostly during the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BCE). This was the inevitable and devastating war between the two most powerful states in Greece, Athens and Sparta, and their allies. The conflict embroiled virtually all of Greece and the conflict spread to Sicily and the Black Sea.
What is less common knowledge, however, is that Aristophanes was not the first wartime comic. He was only one of an entire movement of authors known as Old Comedy who were active during the war. The three acknowledged masters of Athenian Old Comedy were as Aristophanes, Cratinus and Eupolis. Tantalising details of Eupolis’ life and plays reveal that he represents the first wartime comic, criticizing, lampooning (and occasionally praising) the conduct of the war and the individuals involved. Eupolis reveals remarkable possibilities for the role of comedy during wartime, a tradition which continued down the centuries and into today’s conflicts virtually unchanged.
Old Comedy
We know relatively little of the lives of many of the authors of Old Comedy and Cratinus and Eupolis are no exception. They, along with the other writers of Old Comedy exist only in fragments or testimonia and no full plays survive. Even for Aristophanes, only eleven of the forty plays he wrote survive.
Unsurprisingly then, Aristophanes dominates Old Comedy for modern commentators; Cratinus has come to take second place whilst Eupolis has been relegated to a distant third. There are many other authors of comic plays (almost sixty) who we know from the surviving lists of victors at the Dionysia and Lenaia festivals, the two dramatic festivals on the Attic calendar. There are, however, remarkable insights to be found in even the briefest of anecdotes regarding these other authors. We do have a list of victories for Cratinus and Eupolis (whose record of seven prizes, four at the Dionysia and three in the Lenaia from only fourteen or fifteen plays submitted is a remarkable strike rate; four of his seven plays submitted for the Dionysia won).
Cratinus’ career was long, his first play coming in around 454 and his last in 423. In that career of approximately 24 plays he achieved nine victories. Aristophanes won much less often with perhaps only two victories at the Dionysia (Babylonioi may have won in 426 and he won again in 387) and three at the Lenaia (Acharnians, Knights and Frogs). Yet we know some of his plays came second at the Dionysia (Wasps, Peace, and Birds), and Clouds came third.
Ian Storey compares Aristophanes with Steven Spielberg, a great artist largely ignored by the establishment of his day. Plato certainly uses Aristophanes as the key representative of Comedy in his dialogues the Apology and the Symposium. The question then is how Aristophanes came to be regarded as the greatest exponent of Old Comedy even in antiquity, but that is not one not a question which can be answered here!
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