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FRAGMENTS OF ARISTOPHANES

P. has produced a new edition of the Aristophanic fragments accompanied by a translation and commentary. Unlike other comic playwrights of antiquity, with Aristophanes we find ourselves in the fortunate state of having 11 extant plays out of 40 attributed to him, with 976 fragments, 589 of which have been attributed to specific plays. Nevertheless, most of the fragmentary plays by Aristophanes remain underexplored, in spite of the substantial progress made in research regarding the work of other comic playwrights during the last decade (cf. the critical commentaries of E. Bakola, Cratinus and the Art of Comedy [2010], D. Olson, Broken Laughter [2007] and A. Papachrysostomou, Six Comic Poets [2008], to mention but a few). This volume marks a step of significant progress in the realm of the Aristophanic fragments, the presentation of which has never been as well informed and illuminating as in the present work. As stated in the introduction (p. 9), P. adopts the edition by R. Kassel and C. Austin (PCG 3.2 [1984]), while also considering other editions, which he lists on p. 13. Study of the fragments is facilitated by the structure of the book, with a brief introduction describing the state of the survival, transmission and the amount of comedies from all three ancient comic eras (Old, Middle and New), with particular reference to Aristophanes. The book presents the fragments in the following structural outline: after the introduction comes a bibliographical note, which is quite extensive, reinforcing the usefulness of the book as a bibliographical guide to not only the legacy of Aristophanes but the genre of Comedy in general. Next come the edited fragmentary plays in alphabetical order (according to the Greek titles) with the translation accompanied by a commentary with notes on various aspects of the text, (con)textual, linguistic and historical. After the fragments that have been assigned to specific plays, we find the unattributed fragments and, finally, the dubiously attributed fragments. A list of abbreviations at the beginning and an index of proper names at the end complete the volume. Of the aforementioned critical aspects, particularly interesting are those of a nonlinguistic nature, where P. discusses the content of the fragments and offers a potential plot reconstruction (e.g. the attempt to interpret the connotations of the name in the title of the first fragmentary play in the book, Aeolosicon, implying a disguise, Aeolus as Sicon or vice versa and the allusion to the apparent tragic model of the comedy, Euripides’ Aeolus, the content of which Aristophanes wishes to ridicule [p. 39–40]; or in Daedalus, where we read the suggestion that ‘the father of gods was assisted by Daedalus in his amorous adventures’ [p. 130]), assigning lines to specific characters (e.g. fr. 361, where Kock [CAF I, p. 484] argues that one of the two speakers here is THE CLASSICAL REVIEW 337