Aeschylus has just defeated Euripides in the verse-weighing round of their contest. In 1407–10 he issues a final challenge, that with two lines he could outweigh Euripides' whole household. But as it stands the challenge is incomplete; to finish it we need something like ‘and my poetry would easily appear the heavier’. Perhaps Aeschylus is interrupted by the next speaker— or, it has been suggested, by a thunderclap heralding the arrival of Pluto.

The staging of Aristophanes' Ecclesiazusae is complicated considerably by the large number of individual male citizen parts in the play. These include Praxagora's husband Blepyrus, Blepyrus' anonymous Neighbour and his friend Chremes, the First Citizen and the Second Citizen, the Young Man ‘Epigenes’, and the δεσπτης who leads out the Chorus. These are not necesarily all independent characters, but the great difficulty with the play is in deciding precisely who is to be identified with whom. R. G. Ussher, the most (...) recent Oxford editor of the text, distinguishes four separate characters, and divides the parts in the following way. (shrink)

Interest in νομαστìκωμδєȋν began early. Even before the compilation of prosopo-graphical κωμδούμєνο in the second century B.C., Hellenistic study of Aristophanes had devoted attention to the interpretation of personal satire. The surviving scholia contain references to Alexandrian scholars such as Euphronius, Eratosthenes and Callistratus which show that in their commentaries and monographs these men had dealt with issues of νομαστì κωμδєȋν Much material from Hellenistic work on Old Comedy was transmitted by later scholars, particularly by Didymus and Symmachus in their (...) variorum editions, and was eventually embodied in the scholia, though of course in an abridged and sometimes distorted form. Many of our fragments of Old Comedy, preserved in the scholia or in medieval works of reference as parallels to passages in Aristophanes, are direct evidence of the long ancient tradition of interest in the genre's large element of personal satire. What we find in the scholia should not therefore be treated as representative only of the latest and most derivative stages of ancient scholarship. It is the purpose of this article to argue that the scholia on Aristophanes allow us to see that in matters of νομαστì κωμδєȋν certain assumptions about the nature of this type of comic material were persistently made by ancient scholars, and that certain interpretative habits were consequently developed from them. It is my further aim to suggest that this pattern of interpretation has been widely but unjustifiably perpetuated in later work on Aristophanes. (shrink)

I do not think it is possible to show beyond reasonable doubt that the two slaves who open the play either must have been, or cannot have been, visually identifiable by portrait-masks or otherwise as Demosthenes and Nikias. I wish however to point out a piece of evidence that appears to have gone unnoticed.