The Birth of Comedy ─ Texts, Documents, and Art from Athenian Comic Competitions, 486-280

Aside from the well-known plays of Aristophanes, many of the comedies of ancient Greece are known only through fragments and references written in Greek. Now a group of distinguished scholars brings these nearly lost works to modern readers with lively English translations of the surviving texts.

The Birth of Comedy brings together a wealth of information on the first three generations of Western comedy. The selection of translations is based on the universally praised scholarly edition in Greek, Poetae (Build Graeci, by R. Kassel and C.A. Austin. Authors are presented in chronological order. Additional chapters contain translations of texts relating to comedy at dramatic festivals, staging, audience, and ancient writers on comedy. The book includes more than forty illustrations of comic scenes, costumes, and masks. The introduction assesses the fragments' contributions to the political, social, and theatrical history of classical Athens. A glossary of komoidoomerroiuthe ancient word for 'people mentioned in comedies"uprovides background information on the most notorious comic victims, A full index includes not only authors, play titles, and, persons mentioned, but themes from the whole Greek comic sphere (including politics, literature and philosophy, celebrities and social scandals, cookery and wine, sex, and wealth).

The Birth of Comedy makes accessible for the first time the rich evidence for all aspects of classical Greek comedy.

Jeffrey Rusten is a professor of classics at Cornell University.

Jeffrey Rusten is a professor of classics at Cornell University. Jeffrey Henderson is William Goodwin Aurelio Professor of Greek Language and Literature at Boston University. David Konstan is John Rowe Workman Distinguished Professor of Classics and the Humanistic Tradition and professor of comparative literature at Brown University. Ralph Rosen is Rose Family Endowed Term Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Niall W. Slater is Dobbs Professor of Latin and Greek at Emory University.