The scholarly community should be grateful for this little book. One can only hope that there will be a second edition that is a bit longer. In Commedie perdute: Antologia di frammenti, Matteo Pellegrino has furnished an impressively concise general introduction to much of what we know of the lost comedies attributed to Aristophanes—those certain, likely, and dubious—in conversation with the most recent scholarship. The book also contains a concise philological analysis of selected fragments. Considering that the book comes at a market price of twenty-two euros and is little bigger than one’s hand, it should be considered (not least) an essential supplement to Jeffrey Henderson’s 2007 Loeb edition of Aristophanes’ complete fragments.
The book begins with a Preface on the ‘shipwreck of Athenian comic dramaturgy’ and how Aristophanes fared historically well in the disaster, with a total of 976 attributed or plausible fragments surviving, or the total contained in Kassel-Austin’s most recent editions. Pellegrino follows Kassel-Austin’s numbering and rarely differs from their Greek. In the Preface, he explains the reasons for the book’s existence: a desire to shorten and (surely reasonably) make more accessible his 2015, 500-page edition and analysis of the complete Aristophanic fragments; it also follows from his contributions to Bernhard Zimmermann’s exhaustive and ongoing Fragmenta Comica project (indeed, it shares much methodologically with the latter).[1]
‘Ultimately’, he says, the book aims to offer an ‘initial guide’ to readers unfamiliar with Aristophanic fragments by ‘shrinking complex data into clear exposition’ for undergraduates, postgraduates and broader audiences. Whilst it clearly succeeds in being accessible to scholars (probably of all stages), I cannot image a person approaching this text for any reason outside of academia. Yet it is small, accessible, and contains an enormous amount of information, and that is its best virtue. It is therefore successful in accomplishing its major goals.
Following the Preface is a short and rather perfunctory Note on the Text, after which follows a vast bibliography—or rather, resources Pellegrino considers most relevant to the study of Attic Comedy generally and Aristophanes in particular. The volumes, commentaries, translations and articles number more than 250 (at which point I stopped counting) and they represent studies in all major European languages. Here one should take note: it is for this resource alone—this bibliography—that Anglophone scholars should have a copy of this book. That is, for scholarship that gets overlooked because it is not in English. It is also contained in a compact yet readable form. Much credit, then, to the Press simply for easy legibility here. Much credit to the Press, in fact, for having made this book so accessible in general—and I have not found any major errors (lest perchance I were to scrutinize the most miniscule details of its closing Index, which I did not think necessary). A great deal of care and attention went into the production of this volume.
After the Preface, Note and Bibliography, the book is split into two major parts, the first of which is an introduction to the current state of scholarship on Aristophanic fragmentary comedy: ‘Introduction: The Lost Comedies’. It is only 21 pages and provides appropriately skeletal outlines—what I like to call philologically responsible outlines—of each lost comedy attributed to Aristophanes (they number, it seems, 35 in total, although Pellegrino shrinks the four Dramas attributed to the poet into one). For each lost comedy—ordered according to likeliest chronology of production—Pellegrino collates what scholarship generally agrees were foundational elements in short paragraphs: the chronology itself, major themes/motifs or rudiments of plot, characters, and other plausible arguments regarding content. But the bulk of this ‘Introduction’ comes from the mammoth footnotes running alongside the commentary, wherein each claim regarding the plays’ contents is justified (NB: p. 52, n. 79 and 80 take up almost two pages). Some may say this Zeller-esque technique is outdated and unnecessary, but I find them appropriate, as the goal of the footnotes is to be a compendium of scholarship per se rather than discussion or polemics. In this way, Pellegrio’s methodology is very conservative and follows the Fragmenta Comica project—it does not make any great leaps of imagination but tries simply to give facts.
There is one case, however, where this methodology falters. Pellegrino splits the poet’s productive life into three distinct periods which are alleged to reflect differing poetic and political concerns. The first period extends from 427 to 421 B.C.E., during and often reflecting the Archidamian War; the second period is between 421 and 404; the final extends from the end of the Peloponnesian War to the poet’s death (404 to ca. 386/5). Pellegrino argues that the first period represents strong anti-Cleonic sensibilities and political concerns that are pacifist in nature, whilst exhibiting anxieties concerning the new education embodied by Socrates and the Sophists. The second period, Aristophanes’ most prolific, reflects utopian and vivid interests in the world of women and literature. The final period exhibits the movement into Middle Comedy—mythological comedies, plays of recognition, and sexual violence.
I do not argue against the chronology of the plays as such. Rather, it is the thematic distinctions between periods that seem to me unhelpful and usually lacking in evidence. The Storks, for example, probably had a Chorus of storks (perhaps similar to the Chorus in Birds) and viciously attacked several politicians in the same vein as Aristophanes’ anti-Cleonic rhetoric, all whilst somehow ridiculing the new learning of the city. Yet Storks was produced in the 390s. Concerns about sophists and theological innovations pervaded Aristophanes’ career, as we see in the Seasons (produced between 420 and 412) to the Telemessians (400/399?). It’s unclear, too, whether mythological comedies were really the purview of Aristophanes’ late period. Daedalus, Danaids, Heroes, Polyidas, Lemnian Women, Phoenician Women are all dated squarely in Pellegrino’s middle period
What seems to me more heuristically valuable and grounded in evidence is not asking how Aristophanes evolved thematically in distinct periods but how he deployed certain thematic content in individual comedies in their immediate historical-poetic contexts, and only then speculating on his creative (psychological?) development. The lost comedies are so lacunose and have so much crossbreeding with the extant works in what does remain that we cannot productively distinguish ‘thematic periods’ of Aristophanes’ career.
Fortunately, this thematic-chronological distinction plays no real role in Pellegrino’s analyses of the fragments in the second part of the book: ‘Anthology of Fragments’. The latter title is a bit misleading, however—one would expect an anthology of the fragments, but it is instead a collection of chosen fragments, with Greek and Italian translation, that Pellegrino considers most informative to understand scholarship’s broadest shared interests (historical, political, poetic). He presents selected fragments in Greek with translation and provides an ‘analysis of [their] linguistic characteristics, style, metre, paratragic elements, mythological references, komodoumenoi, and Realia’. Of course, which fragments to include is a subjective one: one person’s fragmentary comedy is not another’s just in virtue of the weight put upon a single scrap of evidence (it should be noted that the testimonia are all subsumed in the discussions).
But Pellegrino is more often successful in this exercise than not and, in such a short volume and considering its goals, does good work. Consider the first Clouds, which has long been the comedy of most interest to scholars of Aristophanes’ early works. I was very surprised: Pelligrino discusses only four fragments (Frr. 392, 393, 394, 401 K.A.) over three pages (p. 85-7), with a brief discussion of the testimonia and commentaries earlier (p. 38). Thus, one of Aristophanes’ lost comedies that contains tremendous interest from scholars receives one of Pellegrino’s smallest treatments. But the four fragments and short introduction do give an excellent general comprehension of what was and what might have been in the comedy. The discussion of Fr. 392—which demonstrates there was a relationship between Socrates and Euripides—is critical simply in foregrounding the possible theme(s) of the original; Fr. 394—on the location of the Chorus in relation to Mount Parnassus and their anger—aptly discusses how the original Chorus differed in location and attitude from the extant comedy; and the single word ‘μετεωρολέσχας’ that is Fr. 401 (which is translated, disputably, ‘People with their head in the clouds’) provides an opportunity to discuss the kinds of people that populated the original play.
But the inclusion of Fr. 393 was both surprising and most informative to me. Fr. 393 K.A.: κείσεσθον ὥσπερ πηνίω βινουμένω is translated: ‘Giaceranno insieme come due farfalle che fottono’ or ‘They’ll lie there like two moths fucking’. The fragment is included in Pellegrino’s anthology not because it describes who was in the comedy but how they were described or appeared, and what it means for Plato’s Apology. The major philological problem in the fragment is the meaning of πηνίω—the dual (second or third person) of an insect Photius and the Suda, who preserve the fragment, call a πηνίον. The πηνίον is said to be a ‘ζῷον ὅμοιον κώνωπι’ or ‘an animal like a mosquito (κώνωψ)’. The insects of Fr. 393 K.A. refer to ‘the circle about Chaerephon’ to denote their ‘ξηρότης’ (thinness) and ‘ἀσθένεια’ (physical weakness) and, as scholarship seems to agree, probable ephemerality.[2] Because πηνίον is also the diminutive of ‘web’ (πῆνος or πηνή) from a spindle, we can easily envision the Socratics as mosquito-like creatures with (dried-up?) comic phalluses that exhibit Old Comic exuberance par excellence. Socrates may thus obliquely refer to (in a corrective sense, as it were) such creatures in his self-comparison to a gadfly, or μύωψ, at Apology 30c3-31c3. I do not understand why Pellegrino chooses ‘moths’—strictly speaking nocturnal and large Abraxas grossulariata, or magpie moths—rather than Torchio’s more intuitive suggestion of mayflies, or Ephemera vulgaris: mosquito-like moths that live for a day during maturity.[3] But it was Pellegrino’s reference to an older study by Capra, which Torchio does not include, that made the brilliant connection to the Apology and such imagery.[4]
One can always wish for more with Clouds I—especially discussions of the revisions. But we are given plenty of material to follow up with on our own terms, which is a virtue for a short study on fragmentary comedy. This goes for every comedy examined in the book: what is provided gives food for thought even with some necessary frustration for those familiar with what is not included (consider esp. the omission of Fr. 552 on Chaerephon in the Telemessians, and Frr. 583 and 584 on the retinue of Callias and Chaerephon in the Seasons). Perhaps the second edition of the book should be called Pellegrino’s Anthology of Fragments. But this would be said of any selection of fragments from any scholar.
Thus, we end up with a small book that successfully yields a clever ‘guide’—though one that is somewhat unwieldy. One needs to go back and forth to remember the introductory material before consulting the fragments. It is also selective, with necessarily attendant pitfalls. Yet it manages to compress an incredible amount of ‘complex data’ about Aristophanic fragments in general and specified fragments in particular into a digestible format. It is a resource book, essential for any scholar working with fragments, not just university students. Literature on fragmentary comedy is booming and this compendium must be included in the collections of those working on it.
Notes
[1] Pellegrino, M. (2015) Aristofane. Frammenti. Testo, traduzione e commento a cura di Matteo Pellegrino. Pensa MultiMedia. Pellegrino, M. (2013) Nicofonte. Introduzione, Traduzione e Commento. Verlag Antike.
[2] Which suggests a question: if the Socratics were ephemeral in some way, how shall we square such Socratic ephemerality with Socrates’ godlike suspension in the extant Clouds? When Socrates, suspended in his famous basket, literally calls Strepsiades ‘ephemeral’ instead? (‘τί με καλεῖς ὦφήμερε;’ – Clouds vv. 223).
[3] Torchio, M. C. (2021) Aristofane: Nepheli protai – Proagon (fr. 392-486): Traduzione e commento, 43-6. Verlag Antike.
[4] Capra, A. (2007) ‘Stratagemmi comici da Aristofane a Platone. Parte I. II: satiro ironico (Simposio, Nuvole e altro)’ in Stratagemmi: Prospettiva Teatrali 2, 40-43.