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General Introduction XXXV
The typical fifth-century comedy falls into two well-defined parts,
usually of more or less equal length. The first of these we find devoted
to the creation of some incongruous situation, the second to the results
of this, presented in a series of short scenes that have little dramatic
coherence and no development. The function of the parabasis is to
separate these two sections of the play. At the conclusion of the former
the characters leave the stage to attend to some business that has resulted
from the new situation, and the Leader of the Chorus wishes
them well in a brief "tag" called the kommation, which is in some way
or other metrically distinguished from the verse in which the preceding
scene has been written. The kommation is followed by a passage approximately
one hundred lines in length which quite interrupts the action of
the comedy and is usually divorced from it absolutely, having no essential
connection either with what has gone before or with what is to follow.
Its dramatic utility is restricted to the creation of verisimilitude with
respect to time, and we frequently find that the second part of the play
presupposes the lapse of an appreciable interval during the delivery of
the parabasis.
As soon as the actors have left the stage the Chorus turns and faces
the audience while its Leader briefly announces that the parabasis will
now be delivered. The lines in which this is proclaimed are to be regarded
as part of the kommation, the function of which will thus be to cover
the exits of the actors and the movements of the Chorus. Once these have
been completed the Leader addresses the audience directly, speaking as
though he were the poet himself, in a passage of varying length called the
anapests, from the metre in which it is usually composed. The contents
of the anapests differ widely in the various comedies, but political advice
to the Athenian populace and defence by the poet of his literary productions
are amongst the most frequent motifs. The normal emotional disposition
is a crescendo of excitement, which reaches its culmination in a
connected passage several lines in length, delivered at full speed and in
one breath, and aptly named pnigos or "choker." After the pnigos comes
one of those astounding changes of mood and manner peculiar to fifthcentury
comedy and extremely difficult for us to follow. There is a moment
of silence; then the First Semi-Chorus sings the ode, a relatively
short passage in simple lyric metres and not divided into strophe and
antistrophe. The subjects of the odes are most frequently religious and
the atmosphere is nearly always serious, sometimes even wistful or sad.
In them we find some of the finest lyric poetry that Greece has given us.
But as we read one of these early comedies and come abruptly from
the satirical extravagance of the pnigos to the haunting beauty of the
ode we have to exert ourselves mightily in order to effect the emotional
readjustment that is necessary, and we cannot refrain from wondering