Of the various Greek dramatic genres, Old Comedy was the only one which was able explicitly to incorporate within its scripts discussion of itself as an artform. Tragedy, and so far as we can see satyr-play also, rigidly maintained the convention that the characters must speak and act only within the fictive situation; and in the fictive situation, belonging as it normally did to the remote heroic age, there was no such thing as drama on which to comment. Comedy too, by the time of Menander, had developed a parallel convention, with certain welldefined exceptions (such as the divine prologue and the concluding appeal for applause); here, to be sure, the characters are normally contemporary Athenians, and drama is therefore very much part of their lives, but specific reference to dramatic texts and performances in Menander seems always to relate to tragedy 1 . The convention seems to have developed gradually in the course of the fourth century BC: about the middle of that century Antiphanes could still complain of the difficulties comic dramatists face in making their plots and situations clear to the audience 2 and Alexis could savage his older rival, Aristophanes’ son Araros, in a blistering oneliner 3 ; one would dearly love, too, to know more about Timokles’ comedy Dionysiazousai (“Women celebrating the Dionysia“), of which Athenaios has preserved a substantial fragment 4 explaining the beneficial effects of tragedy on the spectator (it reassures him that there is always someone worse off than he is!) but not, alas, the passage that must surely have followed it dealing with comedy 5 . These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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