Who "Invented" Comedy? The Ancient Candidates for the Origins of Comedy and the Visual Evidence
The formal beginning of comedy is firmly dated to the Dionysia of 486 B.C.E.1 For what preceded it there were at least three ancient candidates: phallic processions, Doric comedy and Susarion. Each is supported by visual evidence of the sixth century B.C.E., each explains certain features of Old Comedy, but all have some anomalies as well. Striking is how many forms of performance attested in the sixth century contained comic elements. All these other forms ceased with the introduction of comedies to the Dionysia in 486 B.C.E., which coincides with the ascendancy of the demos; yet it was not until forty years later that comedy becomes unabashedly political.
How the dithyramb got its shape
Pindar's Dithyramb 2opens with a reference to the historical development of the genre it exemplifies, the celebrated circular chorus of classical Greece. The first two lines were long known from various citations, notably in Athenaeus, whose sources included the fourth-century authors Heraclides of Pontus and Aristotle's pupil Clearchus of Soli. The third line appears, only partly legible, on a papyrus fragment published in 1919, which preserves some thirty lines of the dithyramb including most of the first antistrophe (thereby guaranteeing the metre for some reconstruction of the first strophe).
The History of Classical Scholarship
These include a survey of the lives and works of the leading Tf & TIT scholars from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century. Each of the ' b ' ' periods embraced opens with a chronological conspectus of the scholars of Crown 8vo, that period, giving the dates of their births and deaths, and, in the last four 8s 6d. net each centuries, grouping them under the nations to which they belong. The two volumes contain sixty-two portraits and other illustrations.