Introduction

25

contrast, calls him charming, shrewd in his use of mockery, and graceful and
elegant, and places him in polar contrast to Cratinus in these regards, with
Aristophanes representing a happy medium between the other two poets.
These evaluations—both Byzantine in date—are simultaneously so vague and
so contradictory, and likely based on so little hard evidence, that it is better
to begin with the fragments of Eupolis themselves. The information at our
disposal is limited and is presumably skewed by our sources, which have
their own disparate purposes, but are mostly interested in a limited range of
curiosities, above all else Atticisms and various rare and problematic words.
The papyri (esp. frr. 99; *260) represent random samples of the actual text of
the comedies, and thus provide some limited control on this information. As
is also the case, however, with Eupolis’ thematic concerns (Section 4) and his
metrical practices and formal structuring devices (Section 7), we are largely
thrown back here on comparison with the Aristophanic material, which is far
richer and accordingly far better understood.
Aristophanes’ Greek is marked in the first instance by its colloquial charac-
ter, which is to say its use of vocabulary items, forms and formation strategies,
set phrases and constructions mostly absent from elevated poetry and prose
of the same period but common in day-to-day use. The Greek of the Athenian
street must have been far cruder, more difficult and more diverse than what we
get in comedy, where even farmers and domestic slaves speak clearly, use more
or less standard vocabulary, and generally produce complete sentences with
coherent syntax. Comedy is nonetheless as close as we are likely ever to get to
how average Athenians talked, and Aristophanic language is full not only of
words for items tragedy rarely deigns to mention or mentions only via periph-
rases, but also of casual expressions of all sorts, on the one hand, and banal
oaths and rustic crudities, on the other. This colloquial character is one of the
most important characteristics that drew Hellenistic and Roman-era scholars
to late 5th- and 4th-century comedy, hence the survival of so many fragments of
the plays—in contrast to 4th-century tragedy, for example, which seems to have
inspired no similar interest in Alexandria and other ancient research centers,
and which is accordingly almost entirely lost. But the colloquial conversation-
al style of Aristophanic characters is simultaneously enlivened by a constant
sprinkling of clever coinages, unexpected images and verbal flights of fancy,
and appeals to high-style registers. These elements stand in contrast to the
“normal” language that dominates the plays, and the discontinuity between
the two strands is a basic source of verbal interest in the plays.
Eupolis’ Greek has a similar character to such an extent that, had we a
passage of iambic trimeter poetry that we knew belonged to either him or
Aristophanes, it would be difficult to assign it to one man or the other on