ABSTRACT
This chapter will attempt to demonstrate the influence that the genre of comic drama had on Greek rhetoric in style, vocabulary, technique and theme. To all intents and purposes this will mean the influence of so-called Old Comedy, since Middle Comedy is little more than a concept and our earliest examples of New Comedy (excluding the fragments) post-date the great rhetorical works of the late fifth and fourth centuries, upon which I shall be focusing. Just occasionally it might be possible to glimpse a stock character of New Comedy, like the braggart soldier, behind the scenes; mostly, however, I shall be taking my cue from the plays of Aristophanes. Now it is obvious that humour can be found in many places other than on the comic stage, and equally clear that not all the humour found in the speeches of the orators need have (or was likely to have) been inspired by the comic genre. The larger subject of the use of humour, in general, in ancient rhetorical theory and practice is beyond the scope of this study. It has, anyway, been treated on numerous previous occasions, especially from the theoretical point of view, from antiquity to the present. But between these works and the present enquiry stands the obtrusive figure of Aristotle, whose prim views of propriety were antipathetic to the vigour of Old Comedy, especially the more abusive elements in it, which he excluded from ‘good’ rhetoric. This study will overleap the bounds he set and examine the texts of the orators for echoes or applications of Old Comedy in practice.1
