FrC 8.2: Eupolis, frr. 147–325, von S. Douglas Olson

Eupolis son of Sosipolis was born in 447/6 BCE and was thus an almost exact contemporary of Aristophanes. According to the Suda, he died in the course of the Peloponnesian War in a shipwreck (i.e. a naval battle) in the Hellespont. Whether he is the Eupolis whose name is recorded in a list of war-casualties dating to around 412/1 BCE is impossible to say, but none of his plays seem to have been staged after that date. Eupolis’ career thus lasted less than twenty years, but he came to be recognized as one of the three greatest poets of the so-called Athenian “Old Comedy”, along with Aristophanes and Cratinus from the previous generation. Inscriptional and literary evidence shows that he was victorious after Aristophanes at the City Dionysia festival, but before him at the Lenaea, and that seven of his sixteen plays took the prize — an astonishing figure in a time when five poets competed in every competition. Complete copies of a number of Eupolis’ comedies, some of them equipped with extensive scholarly commentaries, were still in circulation in Egypt in the late Roman period, and Latin authors such as Horace and Persius refer to them. What survive today, on the other hand, are about 500 fragments (one of them over 100 lines long) preserved on papyri and in quotations and references by later authors. The new three-volume Fragmenta Comica edition of the fragments of Eupolis represents the first full-scale modern philological commentary on this extraordinary material, with attention not just to the poet’s own words, but to the way they were handled by the ancient sources that pass them down to us.