Aristophanes, Fandom and the Classicizing of Greek Tragedy

It is no doubt true that the questions I would like to address in this chapter, which concern Aristophanes’ role (and more broadly, the role of Old Comedy) in disseminating and popularizing Greek tragedy, can never be answered adequately, given the nature of the evidence we have to work with. But it is also true that if any progress can be made in answering them, Alan Sommerstein’s magisterial editions of Aristophanes, as well as his other voluminous work on Greek drama, deserve a good deal of the credit for it. For during the course of his long-standing scholarly engagement with Aristophanes, Professor Sommerstein has often shown a particular interest in the interaction of comedy and tragedy during the Classical period, and his own contributions to this topic throughout his Aristophanes commentaries have directly inspired the discussion that follows. Comments Reprinted from Playing Around Aristophanes: Essays in Celebration of the Completion of the Edition of the Comedies of Aristophanes by Alan Sommerstein, edited by L. Kozak and John Rich (Oxford: Aris & Phillips, 2006), pages 27-47. This book chapter is available at ScholarlyCommons: http://repository.upenn.edu/classics_papers/28 Aristophanes, Fandom and the Classicizing of Greek Tragedy Ralph M. Rosen University of Pennsylvania It is no doubt true that the questions I would like to address in this chapter, which concern Aristophanes’ role (and more broadly, the role of Old Comedy) in disseminating and popularizing Greek tragedy, can never be answered adequately, given the nature of the evidence we have to work with. But it is also true that if any progress can be made in answering them, Alan Sommerstein’s magisterial editions of Aristophanes, as well as his other voluminous work on Greek drama, deserve a good deal of the credit for it. For during the course of his long-standing scholarly engagement with Aristophanes, Professor Sommerstein has often shown a particular interest in the interaction of comedy and tragedy during the Classical period, and his own contributions to this topic throughout his Aristophanes commentaries have directly inspired the discussion that follows. In simplest terms, we may put the problem this way: In fifth-century Athens, how was the literary legacy of a tragic dramatist—composing as he normally did with his eye on a single, ephemeral performative event—formed and ensured? In an age of uncertain, probably limited, literacy, when the very notions of “publication” and “readership” seemed inchoate and unstable at best, what were the mechanisms by which tragedians became “classicized” both within their own generation, and in subsequent periods? How did they ensure their own fame? How is it that some poets became part of a literary canon, while others were soon forgotten, or at least had a relatively short shelflife in Athenian culture (which, of course, means, that they rarely make it down to our