34

Eupolis

to other comic poets “making fun of rags” points specifically at Eupolis (fr.
400). Peace, at any rate, took third place behind Eupolis’ Kolakes and Cratinus’
Cheimazomenoi, and in one of his Autolykos plays (probably Autolykos I the
next year) Eupolis made a mocking reference to the statue of the goddess in
the play. Plato Comicus (fr. 62) did the same, and the obvious implication is
that the production of Aristophanes’ play was marred by an ugly staging prob-
lem, and that his rivals happily called attention to the incident at a subsequent
festival as a way of advertising the superiority of their own poetic product.
Aristophanes’ revised Clouds II (early 410s BCE) in turn contains a clear and
explicit attack on Eupolis, whose Marikas (Lenaea 421 BCE) is denounced as a
clumsy reworking of Knights (Nu. 553-4 = Marikas test. i). Fr. 89 (from Baptai)
seemingly responds to the charge—if not necessarily to the specific passage
from Clouds II, which was never staged—by claiming that Knights was in fact
a collaboration between Aristophanes and Eupolis, who graciously allowed
another poet to take credit for his own work (with the idea then realized again
in a different form a few years later in Marikas).
The passages cited above are only a few surviving traces of what must have
been a larger and more complicated conversation involving Aristophanes,
Eupolis and other comic poets,42 and how the individual items of evidence
should be assessed and connected remains uncertain. There can in any case
be little doubt that Aristophanes and Eupolis were open rivals, for only one
man took the prize at every festival, and he did so by convincing the judges
to vote for his own play rather than for a play by one of his competitors. The
more intriguing question is whether Eupolis is telling at least some version
of the truth about the origin of the plot or plots of Knights and Marikas, or
whether there is a better way to think about the situation. There must have
been no more than a few hundred thousand full-blooded Athenian citizens
in the mid-420s BCE, and far less than 10% of them are likely to have been
both interested in a literary education and able to afford one. That more than
fifty individuals were active as comic poets (or aspiring or quondam comic
poets) at any one time in this period is difficult to believe; only a handful of
those men will have staged comedies consistently year after year; and the
two most successful young playwrights of their generation must inevitably
have known one another. Aristophanes and Eupolis might thus easily have
been friends (or at least friendly) and have talked about the plot of Knights

42 Fr. 99.48 (from Demoi) was identified by Wilamowitz as a reworking of Cratin. fr.
71, which might or might not be right; see n. ad loc. Even if the thesis is correct,
however, Cratinus had by this point likely been dead for many years, making it
more difficult to treat the alleged quotation as another part of this dialogue.