FrC 17: Anaxandrides, von Benjamin Millis

Anaxandrides (mid-4th century BC) was a leading and successful comic poet of his day. He seems in some sense to have been a favourite comic poet of the philosopher Aristotle, or at least a poet whose works Aristotle could assume most people were very familiar with. According to one strand of ancient scholarship, he was instrumental in the development of Greek comedy, apparently by pioneering the sort of ‘love intrigue’ plot more familiarly associated with later comedy. Many surviving titles suggest a penchant for mythological themes (e.g. Helen, Herakles, Theseus, Odysseus) or stock characters (e.g. Rustic, Hoplomachos, Pharmakomantis); other titles seem to prefigure those common some decades later (e.g. Treasure, Samian Woman). The extant fragments frequently refer to various elements of contemporary life and society; interestingly, this is frequently also the case the ‘mythological’ plays, thus suggesting that there was not a clear separation of the mythological and contemporary worlds in Anaxandrides’ plays. Of special note is a lengthy tour de force banquet catalogue, one of the very longest book fragments of any comic poet.