Introduction

35

when the play was in its formative stages. Or perhaps Eupolis really did de-
vote time to the text or staging of Aristophanes’ comedy (because he had no
play accepted for a festival that year and needed a professionally rewarding
way to pass his time?). If so, something very bad had happened between the
two men by the early 410s BCE, given that Aristophanes at Nu. 554 calls the
supposed appropriation of his own material “nasty work by a nasty person”
(κακός κακώς). But comic poets must in any case have watched one another’s
performances closely, and prize-winning plays like Knights were doubtless
treated as particularly promising potential partial templates for offerings at
upcoming archon’s try-outs and festival competitions. The alternative and
arguably simpler hypothesis is accordingly that Eupolis waited a few years,
took the basic outline of the plot of Knights, and reworked it for a play of
his own with a Hyperbolos-like figure as the central character in place of
Aristophanes’ Cleon-like Paphlagonian, while also adding inter alia a drunk
old woman standing in somehow for Hyperboles’ mother (Ar. Nu. 555-6 =
Marikas test. i). Aristophanes was clearly stung by the disastrous reception of
the original Clouds (see also V. 1016-59), and in the passage of the revised play
in which he attacks Eupolis his main purpose is to defend his own poetic bona
fides. The description of the composition of Marikas as “turning Knights inside
out”, i. e. as a crude act of literary theft rather than an example of a common
phenomenon in a dynamic system in which the results in each year’s dramatic
competitions were used by individual poets to calibrate their offerings for the
next year’s cycle, makes sense as a desperate attempt to tear down a rival. It
ought not necessarily to be treated as much more than that.

9. Literature
Core bibliography (not included in individual volume bibliographies):
Runkel 1829: Martinus Runkelius (ed.), Pherecratis et Eupolidis fragmenta
(Leipzig)
Raspe 1832: Gust. Carol. Henr. Raspe, De Eupolidis ΔΗΜΟΕΣ ac ΠΟΛΕΣΙΝ
(Leipzig)
Bergk 1838: Theodorus Bergk (ed.), Commentationum de reliquiis comoediae
atticae antiquae (2 vols.: Leipzig)
Meineke 1839: Augustus Meineke (ed.), Fragmenta poetarum comoediae anti-
quae (5 vols. in 7: Berlin, 1834-1857)
Meineke 1847: Augustus Meineke (ed.), Fragmenta comicorum graecorum (2
vols.: Berlin)