Old Comedy and the Epic Cycle

Donald R. Sells (University of Toronto)

This paper will argue that certain generic and thematic features of the Epic Cycle made it a highly suitable model for mythological burlesque in Old Comedy of 5^th-century Athens.  Less discriminating than Homer about what subjects were worthy of heroic epic, the Cycle narratives contained not only fantastic and bizarre elements which were highly congenial to Old Comedy’s taste, but its narrative framework, which explicitly contextualized independent events in relation to Troy’s fall, made it a particularly apt vehicle for political allegory.  The most famous example of this is Cratinus’ Dionysalexandros, in which Pericles was famously identified by innuendo with the Trojan Paris for precipitating the Peloponnesian War.

Although the Sicilian Epicharmus was the first comic poet on record to recognize the pseudo-comic feel of the Epic Cycle’s episodic, diverse material – less-than-admiral behavior of heroes, superhuman powers, magical objects, exotic races, utopian settings – Cratinus seems to have been the first to exploit fully the Cycle’s organic ‘overdeterministic’ character which lent more famous episodes (Judgment of Paris) a certain notoriety (Griffin 1977).  An example of this on a much smaller scale is Dicaeopolis’ political speech in Aristophanes’ play Acharnians, albeit through the medium of Euripidean tragedy, in which he  impersonated the Cyclic character Telephos.

Although it is uncertain how early this topical focus of 5^th-century burlesque was introduced, episodes from the Epic Cycle narratives are the earliest examples of this subgenre which eventually forms nearly half of all comedies by the close of the century before evolving into Middle Comedy’s preference for an Athenocentric, highly-rationalized style of mythological burlesque (Bowie 2000; Nesselrath 1990).