One of the ironies of literary history is that the survival of Aristophanic comedy and indeed of all Greek drama is due to the more or less faithful transmission of a written text. Reading a play and watching one, after all, are very different sorts of activities. Unlike a book, in which the reader can leaf backward for reminders of what has already happened or forward for information about what is to come, a play onstage can be experienced in one (...) direction only, from ‘beginning’ to ‘end’. Nor can a play be put down and picked up again at one's leisure or interrupted while the audience puzzles over a difficult or intriguing passage. Live theatre is an ephemeral and essentially independent thing, which must be experienced in its own time and on its own terms or not at all, and as a result we modern readers, dependent on the written page, are at a marked disadvantage in understanding ancient drama. Taplin's study of staging in Aeschylus has shed considerable light on the dramatic technique of Athenian tragedy. Stage-practice in Aristophanic comedy, and in particular the ways in which names and naming are used there, has received much less attention. (shrink)

This article argues that the defamiliarization caused by extensive repetition, termed ‘semantic satiation’ in psychology, was used by ancient poets for specific effects. Five categories of repetition are identified. First, words undergo auditory deformation through syllable and sound repetition, as commonly in ancient etymologies. Second, a tradition of emphatic proper-name repetition is identified, in which the final instance of the name is given special emphasis; this tradition spans Greek and Latin poetry, and ultimately goes back to the Nireus entry in (...) the Catalogue of Ships. Third, repetition is used for wordplay, where the final instance of the repeated term not only is emphasized but also incurs some change to its meaning or shape. Fourth, the incantatory repetition of divine names in hymns and cultic invocations amplifies a sense of divine presence behind and beyond the repetend. Fifth, repetition of half and full lines by different speakers in Old Comedy serves to undercut and parody the original sense of the repeated words. Extensive repetition in ancient literature was never merely ornamental but was used for a range of specific auditory and semantic effects with distinct and identifiable structures. (shrink)