Δήμοι (Introduction)

299

by one of his rivals.187 That observation in turn, however, suggests that we
might do just as well or better to base our hypotheses on the limits of our
knowledge of late 5th-century stage-practice rather than on the inherently
unlikely thesis that we understand them fully.
If fr. 99.1-34 represent the end of the parabasis—the most economical
explanation of the evidence, if not necessarily correct on that account—the
chorus have at this point in the play not yet been introduced to Pyronides or
the dead statesmen. Storey and Telo take it for granted that the chorus has
a single, more or less stable identity throughout the action, so that it cannot
have been present during the initial encounter between Pyronides and the
dead (wherever that was set), hence the hypotheses discussed above. The most
obvious counter-example is the chorus in Aristophanes’ Frogs, which is in
fact two entirely separate choruses, the first of Frogs (Ra. 209-67), the second
of Eleusinian Initiates (Ra. 316-459 and following).188 Nor is this a unique
case, for there is also an initial chorus of huntsmen in Euripides’ Hippolytus
(61-71) who vanish and are replaced by a chorus of local women; and we
know of divided choruses (as in Eupolis’ Marikas, Aristophanes’ Lysistrata
and on the Choregoi vase [adesp. com. fr. 59]) and subsidiary choruses (as in
Aristophanes’ Wasps) as well. Regardless of what one thinks of Keil’s specific
proposal for the identity of the chorus in the first half of Demoi, therefore,
there is no reason to reject his basic insight, which is that choral identity need
not be fixed or simple in 5th-century Athenian drama, and in particular that
it may have changed in the course of Eupolis’ play in such a way that one
chorus was present during an Underworld scene or scenes in the first half of
the action, but a different chorus was onstage when the hero and the dead
statesmen finally returned to Athens after the parabasis.
The Rest of the Action
Fr. 99.78-120 (from PCair. 43227 fr. 3, with a gap of 10-12 verses between
Kassel-Austin’s continuously numbered fr. 99.99 and fr. 99.100) contains two
portions of what is patently a single scene in which a just man (fr. 99.80) con-
fronts another individual (often referred to as “the Sycophant”) who specializes

187 Cf. Keil 1912. 248, who points out how little we really know of the range of com-
positional practices among the late 5th-century comic poets.
188 As Dover 1993. 56-7 observes, there is no particular reason to accept the traditional
theory (see yVME0Barb 209) that the Frog-chorus is heard but not seen. But even if
one believes this, the vital point is that the chorus still has two completely separate
identities in the play and adopts the second only after it sheds the first.