Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks

Pleasure and Leisure 281
descends to Hades in order to bring back Euripides from the dead,
though in the end he decides instead to resurrect Aeschylus, on the
grounds that Euripides’ poetry is partly responsible for Athens’s
current troubles.
In the fourth century, a new style of comedy evolved that was
almost entirely shorn of chorus and contained no contemporary
allusions. Its greatest exponent was Menander (342–ca. 293 b.c.e. ).
Only one of his plays, Ill-Tempered Man, has survived in more or less
complete form. Most of his plots explore the theme of romantic love
through a complex intermingling of improbable devices including
identical twins, broken families, and abandoned children. The genre,
which is known as New Comedy, was taken over and adapted by
the Romans. New Comedy was destined to provide the basis for
comic inventiveness for centuries to come, an obvious example
being Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors. Aristophanic Old Comedy,
by contrast, was never revived and had no theatrical afterlife before
the twentieth century.
Conclusions
Tragedy and comedy may be said to be two sides of the same
coin. The principal difference is that, whereas tragedy explored the
tragic consequences of conflict, comedy envisioned the possibility
of some kind of reconciliation or resolution, however far-fetched.
Between these extremes, there was little place for melodrama or
sentimentality.
Publicly funded, profoundly civic in orientation, and fundamentally
sacred in character, Attic drama might at first sight strike us
as a covert means of reinforcing social conformity. The truth was
far different. Although drama took place in a religious context, the
playwrights did not see it as their objective to offer pious platitudes
or promote supine obedience to the will of the gods. On the contrary,
they were anything but shy of depicting the Olympians as
degenerate and even morally repellent whenever it suited their
purposes. Legend had it that, after witnessing Thespis’s first tragedy,
the Athenian audience was so mystified by its lack of religious
content that they angrily demanded, “What’s this got to do with
Dionysos?” The question is still posed by scholars to this day.
What drama chiefly did was to provide a context in which issues
of public and private concern could be literally aired in the open.
Its purpose, in other words, was not to promote some kind of party
line or function as a moral arbiter, but rather to give expression to