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spirit of these Roman festivals had much more in common with the medieval
carnival, or the modern state fair, than with the dramatic festivals
held at Athens during the fifth century bc. The Great Dionysia (first held
in 534 bc), the most important Athenian celebration of drama in the
classical period where both tragedies and comedies were staged, tended to
be a more solemn affair with a stronger dose of religiosity. Comic drama
in this period took the form of Old Comedy (first staged in 486 bc), a
style of comedy that was highly politicized and contemporary, full of injokes
and topical references for a mainly Athenian audience. Old Comedy
reached its peak in the brilliant work of Aristophanes (ca. 450–380 bc),
whose biting political parodies are punctuated with raunchy humor
along the lines of modern sketch comedy on Saturday Night Live (1975–
current) or episodes of the satirical cartoon South Park (1997–current).
Roman comedy was loosely based on Greek originals from the later
period of Hellenistic New Comedy (ca. 336–290 bc). The style of Greek
New Comedy was polished, subtle, and apolitical, designed for an increasingly
diverse and geographically widespread audience, filled with stereotypical
bourgeois characters and intricate plots in which romantic love
and tangled domestic relations are dominant themes (Konstan, 15–23).
The Roman comic playwrights, professionals who made their living as
entertainers, kept some Greek theatrical traditions and got rid of other
ones. The Romans borrowed the basic plot structures – the power of love,
disobedient slaves, kidnapping by pirates, mistaken identity, reunited
families – and stock characters, such as pimps, courtesans, slaves, lovers,
cooks, soldiers, and parasites, and then injected a big dose of slapstick and
bawdy Roman humor, and in particular that Latin specialty, the smart-ass
verbal wisecrack (Moore, 50–66). To captivate their demanding – and
sometimes inattentive – Roman audiences, the playwrights also turned up
the audio quotient by doing away with the formal choruses from the
Greek originals and introducing powerful musical scores full of cantica,
“songs,” for the actors to sing in solos, duets, and even all-cast production
numbers.
At Rome, the theater never gained the respected position it held at
Athens, and the Romans always looked down upon those involved in the
theater life, considering “show biz people” to be a bit racy and vulgar.
Actors (all male) were called histriones, and since they were usually foreigners
or slaves, they were held in little esteem, unlike their counterparts
at Athens, who were venerated as artists and recognized with prizes for
individual achievement in some ways similar to the modern Academy
Awards. Roman playwrights were involved in every aspect of the theatrical
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