Ethics in Roman New Comedy (original) (raw)
Related papers
A Cultural History of COmedy, 2020
My contribution will be an overview of the topic of ethics across the Middle Ages and across languages along the lines of a high-level, in-depth encyclopedia article on humor and ethics in the Middle Ages. It will examine the following questions and subjects: Is there an ethics of comedy? From Roman New Comedy through to the comic theory of the Victorians, much comic narrative has been designed with a conservative purpose, to act as a social corrective that seeks to draw attention to, and so modify, the excesses of individuals and society. Similarly, racist or ethnic humour has served to limit or denude the identity of the other. On the other hand, however, satire, parody, and festive comic forms, have sought to open up spaces for freedom of expression and self-actualization. These chapters will consider the many ways in which comedy has explored its ethical dimension.
Taking advantage of the fresh fragmentary discoveries in New Comedy, this paper focuses anew on the relationship between Roman Comedy and fourth-century Greek comedy, and argues that the two genres develop along similar structural principles because they embrace parallel philosophies of dealing with their potential literary models. Setting as premise that postclassical Greek comic drama is the outcome of a well-thought combination of individual genius and cleverly filtered sources, not always literary, the assessment of Plautine and Terentian dramaturgy advanced in this study, is based on extensive discussions of specific case studies and examines in detail the anatomy of a twofold methodology of model reception behind the texts of the palliata. The process in question transforms the so-perceived image of a spontaneous, improvisatory Plautine speech, by proving that Plautus’ literary language, no less than Terence’s own, involves complex intertextuality, which, in turn, comes in the aftermath of a long Quellenforschung whose successful conclusion presupposes critical acumen, powerful memory, and years of experience in viewing and performing Greek comedies.
Roman Satire and the Old Comic Tradition by Jennifer L. Ferriss-Hill
The Classical Journal, 2016
Roman satire from the Middle Ages onward was taught in schools not only for the sake of the moral lessons it offered but also for its peerless introduction to the vocabulary of everyday life, for children needed to learn to speak and write Latin as well as to read it. This connection with the concrete was long admired. In the 1960s, William Anderson, taken with New Criticism and reacting against Gilbert Highet's biographical approach to Juvenal, launched an approach that detached Juvenal's poems from their writer and his times. This caught on, appealing, in the heyday of postmodernism, to those for whom il n'y a pas de hors-texte was axiomatic, and now to a new generation with the return to aesthetics. After 1980, there was a burst of political and Bakhtinian analysis that reclaimed the bodily aspect of satire as an essential constituent, to which my own work belongs, as well as that of Barbara Gold, John Henderson, David Larmour, Paul Allen Miller, and sometimes Susanna Braund, Emily Gowers, and Ellen Oliensis. I say "reclaimed" and "essential" because, in its long run as a curricular favorite, satire has so often been bowdlerized that a sizeable proportion of extant satire has historically been excluded from study. Hence, it seems to me to be a step backward that so much of what has been written on Roman satire since the early 1990s has once again deleted the body by means of a return to aesthetics and Quellen. The two books here under review, both revised dissertations, are no exception, and must then be viewed as part of that disembodied conversation. In Roman Satire and the Old Comic Tradition, Jennifer Ferriss-Hill joins those fascinated by the self-reflexive aspects of ancient literature. Here the author is not so much deleted as placed in a literary Heaven where authors speak only to other authors and write mainly about themselves. She argues that Roman satire models itself on Old Comedy in several ways, all grounded in the text rather than in any historical or political context (so the translation of comedy's "agonistic poetics" to Rome "loses little from the fact that the Roman Satirists were not contemporaneous with each other," 172). The introduction lays out what Roman satirists wrote about Old Comedy and explains how they knew the plays; Ferriss-Hill argues that writers in both genres claim to tell the truth, and that the