From some points of view, Timocles departs from the norm of his time, and in particular from near-contemporary comedians such as Alexis, Eubulus and Antiphanes, and appears to be the most 'Aristophanic' poet of the fourth century. More specifically, in a period when political satire seems to have lost its vigor, he employs acerbic attacks against major and minor Athenian politicians. The fact that at least sixteen of the forty-two surviving fragments of his poetry contain explicit or implicit references to politicians can hardly be attributed to chance. Timocles' inventiveness and versatility are also demonstrated, inter alia, in his combination of different motifs, his association of mythical figures with contemporary personalities and his employment of a figurative language. The present volume follows the principles and structure of the commentaries of the KomFrag project. It includes an introduction on Timocles and a detailed examination and commentary of the testimonies and the surviving fragments.

Dramatic texts come with a natural structure of acts, scenes and speech clearly assigned to characters that lends itself to computational analysis: These explicit structures allow for straightforward formalizations without extensive preparatory work. Work on drama has therefore always been at the forefront of research in computational literary studies, with its pioneers analyzing drama quantitatively long before the digital age. Today, increasingly large digital text corpora are available and computational literary studies aims at a higher-scaled view on literary history, promising to analyze thousands of literary texts simultaneously. After decades of exploring the possibilities offered by computational methods, the field is now undergoing a phase of consolidation that takes stock of achievements and opportunities and critically reflects the computational methods and interpretations derived from data. Building on insights from the fields' tradition and current research approaches, this volume provides an overview of the status quo of computational drama analysis and explores possible routes for the future.

This work is part of the Fragmenta Comica series which aims to provide commentaries and translations to all the surviving fragments and testimonia of the comic poets of ancient Greece. This volume offers the first scholarly commentary and sustained study of several late fourth-century BCE poets of the so-called New Comedy – among them Philippides of Athens, a writer and dramatist highly esteemed in antiquity, known especially for his acrimonious clashes with Athenian demagogues and his influential friendship with foreign kings. All fragments are subject to close textual, linguistic and stylistic analysis, and are interpreted against the wider literary, social and historical background of the period. This volume will be a valuable reference work for scholars and students of ancient comedy, as well as anyone interested in ancient literature more generally and the broader historical and cultural contexts in which these texts were written.

This volume forms the second part of the three-volume commentary on the fragments of Diphilus, who belongs to the prominent triad of the poets of New Comedy alongside Menander and Philemon. The present volume comprises the text and an English translation of the fragments of twenty-two plays of Diphilus, followed by a full-scale (philological, thematic, literary, interpretative, historical) commentary that also yields insight into the reception of Diphilan comedy in Roman theatre. This in-depth study of the Diphilan techniques of verbal humour and performance aims at shedding light on the dramatist's distinctive place in the comic tradition, as well as showcasing a degree of variation in the overall image of the production of new comedy.

This volume acknowledges the centrality of comic invective in a range of oratorical institutions (especially forensic and symbouleutic), and aspires to enhance the knowledge and understanding of how this technique is used in such con-texts of both Greek and Roman oratory. Despite the important scholarly work that has been done in discussing the patterns of using invective in Greek and Roman texts and contexts, there are still notable gaps in our knowledge of the issue. The introduction to, and the twelve chapters of, this volume address some understudied multi-genre and interdisciplinary topics: first, the ways in which comic invective in oratory draws on, or has implications for, comedy and other genres, or how these literary genres are influenced by oratorical theory and practice, and by contemporary socio-political circumstances, in articulating comic invective and targeting prominent individuals; second, how comic invective sustains relationships and promotes persuasion through unity and division; third, how it connects with sexuality, the human body and male/female physiology; fourth, what impact generic dichotomies, as, for example, public-private and defence-prosecution, may have upon using comic invective; and fifth, what the limitations in its use are, depending on the codes of honour and decency in ancient Greece and Rome.

In democratic Athens, mass citizen audiences - whether in the lawcourts, or in the political Assembly and Council, or when gathered for formal civic occasions - frequently heard politicians and litigants discussing the city's past, and manipulating it for persuasive ends. The Rhetoric of the Past in Demosthenes and Aeschines explores how these dynamics worked in practice, taking two prominent mid-fourth-century politicians (and bitter adversaries) as focal points. While most recent scholarly treatments of how the Athenians recalled their past concentrate on collective processes, this work looks instead at the rhetorical strategies devised by individual orators, examining what it meant for Demosthenes or Aeschines to present particular 'historical' examples, arguments, and illustrations in particular contexts. It argues that discussing the Athenian past - and therefore discussing a core aspect of Athenian identity itself - offered Demosthenes and Aeschines, among others, an effective and versatile means both of building and highlighting their own credibility, authority, and commitment to the democracy and its values, and of competing with their rivals, whose own versions and handling of the past they could challenge and undermine as a symbolic attack on those rivals' wider competence. Recourse to versions of the past also offered orators a way of reflecting on a troubled contemporary geopolitical landscape in which Athens first confronted the enterprising Philip II of Macedon and then coped with Macedonian hegemony. The work covers the full range of Demosthenes' and Aeschines' surviving public speeches, and the extended opening chapter includes synoptic surveys of key individual topics which feed into the main discussion.

This volume examines whether dramatic fragments should be approached as parts of a greater whole or as self-contained entities. It comprises contributions by a broad spectrum of international scholars: by young researchers working on fragmentary drama as well as by well-known experts in this field. The volume explores another kind of fragmentation that seems already to have been embraced by the ancient dramatists: quotations extracted from their context and immersed in a new whole, in which they work both as cohesive unities and detachable entities. Sections of poetic works circulated in antiquity not only as parts of a whole, but also independently, i.e. as component fractions, rather like quotations on facebook today. Fragmentation can thus be seen operating on the level of dissociation, but also on the level of cohesion. The volume investigates interpretive possibilities, quotation contexts, production and reception stages of fragmentary texts, looking into the ways dramatic fragments can either increase the depth of fragmentation or strengthen the intensity of cohesion.

Ephippus is an outstanding playwright of Greek Middle Comedy. He won a single Lenaean victory ca. 378-376 BC and continued being productive until the late 340s. His twenty-eight surviving fragments reveal a wide thematic range: myth burlesque (with a special fondness for Heracles), political allegory, sympotic themes, personal mockery, satire of philosophy (Plato), hetairai. His corpus features seven hapax terms, as well as the highest percentage of anapaestic dimeter lines of all poets of Middle Comedy.

This book is a fully-fledged commentary on the fragments of the Greek comic poets Nausicrates and Nicostratus. By reconstructing the text and providing metrical, linguistic, and detailed philological analysis, it makes the work of these neglected authors accessible to all those interested in Greek drama and classical literature at large.

This work is part of the Fragmenta Comica series which aims to provide commentaries and translations to all the surviving fragments and testimonia of the comic poets of ancient Greece. This volume offers the first scholarly commentary and sustained study of several late fourth-century BCE poets of the so-called New Comedy – among them Philippides of Athens, a writer and dramatist highly esteemed in antiquity, known especially for his acrimonious clashes with Athenian demagogues and his influential friendship with foreign kings. All fragments are subject to close textual, linguistic and stylistic analysis, and are interpreted against the wider literary, social and historical background of the period. This volume will be a valuable reference work for scholars and students of ancient comedy, as well as anyone interested in ancient literature more generally and the broader historical and cultural contexts in which these texts were written.