186

Eupolis

notion that there was parallel action in two different settings.96 Wilamowitz
took the three residences/doors to represent brothels run by each of the three
members of Lykon’s family, which can only be described as a reckless and
unlikely guess, even if a number of the fragments of the plays do touch on sex
in one way or another (frr. 54; 64 with n.; 65; 69; 75).
Date A play entitled Autolykos by Eupolis is firmly dated by Herodicus (test,
i) to 420 BCE (festival unknown), and the information finds further support
in fr. 62, which shows that it was staged after—most likely very shortly af-
ter—Aristophanes’ Peace (City Dionysia 421 BCE). Autolykos’ victory at the
Panathenaea is dated only by reference to Eupolis’ play, and Meineke 1826
1.42 suggests that this might mean that his triumph came in 426 BCE and that
the play for which Herodicus supplies a date is Autolykos II. This would put
Autolykos / before Aristophanes’ Wasps rather than after it, and would allow
the remarks at Ar. V. 1024-5 (422 BCE) to refer to something Eupolis said in
that play (fr. 65 with n.), perhaps specifically about the beautiful and desirable
Autolykos in particular. But Xenophon appears to think that Callias was in
charge of the house at the time of Autolykos’ victory, meaning that his father
Hipponicus II must have been dead, putting the story in the second half of
the 420s BCE (see introductory note to Kolakes, Content) and making it far
more likely that the play staged in 420 BCE was Autolykos I. Autolykos II can
be placed precisely in 411 BCE if one assumes both that fr. 49 (n.) belongs to
the revised version of the play rather than the original and that Aristarchus
had never been general before that year. The latter in particular is not a safe
assumption, and if Autolykos I failed to take the prize and the failure motivated
the partial rewrite (as is generally assumed), one would expect Autolykos II to
date only a few years after the original. Otherwise, the play can only be dated
sometime between the performance of Autolykos I and Eupolis’ death likely
in the late 410s BCE—assuming that it was actually performed, as Clouds II
notoriously was not. For further discussion of the date of the Autolykos plays,

96 Storey 2003. 86-9 generates an elaborate theory about the content of the Autolykos,
hypothesizing that it involved a trial between two slaves standing in for the comic
poets Aristophanes and Eupolis and featuring inter alia a talking dog. This is a
clever and occasionally amusing fantasy, but should not be taken seriously or
used as a basis for further such constructions; see Introduction Section 4 on the
problem of reconstructing lost comedies, and cf. the judgments of Nesselrath 2005
“This is admittedly an ingenious construction, but one may well ask whether it is
adequately supported by the evidence available to us”; Kyriakidi 2007. 145 “Die
Interpretation Storeys ist also eine ingeniöse Idee, die aber Eupolis anscheinend
nicht hatte”.