Ancient Greek comedy was one of three principal dramatic Drama is the specific mode of fiction represented in performance. The term comes from a Greek word meaning "action" , which is derived from "to do" (Classical Greek: δράω, dráō). The enactment of drama in theatre, performed by actors on a stage before an audience, presupposes collaborative modes of production and a forms in the theatre of classical Greece The theatre of ancient Greece, or ancient Greek drama, is a theatrical culture that flourished in ancient Greece between c. 550 and c. 220 BC. The city-state of Athens, which became a significant cultural, political and military power during this period, was its centre, where it was institutionalised as part of a festival called the Dionysia, (the others being tragedy Tragedy is a form of art based on human suffering that paradoxically offers its audience pleasure. While most cultures have developed forms that provoke this paradoxical response, tragedy refers to a specific tradition of drama that has played a unique and important role historically in the self-definition of Western civilization. That tradition and the satyr play). Athenian The city of Athens during the classical period of Ancient Greece was a notable polis (city-state) of Attica, Greece, leading the Delian League in the Peloponnesian War against Sparta and the Peloponnesian League. Athenian democracy was established in 508 BC under Cleisthenes following the tyranny of Hippias. This system remained remarkably stable, comedy Comedy as a popular meaning, is any humorous discourse generally intended to amuse, especially in television, film, and stand-up comedy. This must be carefully distinguished from its academic definition, namely the comic theatre, whose Western origins are found in Ancient Greece. In the Athenian democracy, the public opinion of voters was is conventionally divided into three periods, Old Comedy, Middle Comedy, and New Comedy. Old Comedy survives today largely in the form of the eleven surviving plays of Aristophanes Aristophanes , son of Philippus, of the deme Cydathenaus, was a prolific and much acclaimed comic playwright of ancient Athens. Eleven of his forty plays survive virtually complete. These, together with fragments of some of his other plays, provide us with the only real examples we have of a genre of comic drama known as Old Comedy, and they are, while Middle Comedy is largely lost, i.e. preserved only in relatively short fragments in authors such as Athenaeus of Naucratis Athenaeus , of Naucratis in Egypt, Greek rhetorician and grammarian, flourished about the end of the 2nd and beginning of the 3rd century A.D. The Suda only tells us that he lived in the times of Marcus (sc. Aurelius); but the contempt with which he speaks of Commodus (died 192) shows that he survived that emperor. New Comedy is known primarily from the substantial papyrus fragments of Menander Menander , Greek dramatist, the best-known representative of Athenian New Comedy, was the son of well-to-do parents; his father Diopeithes is identified by some with the Athenian general and governor of the Thracian Chersonese known from the speech of Demosthenes De Chersoneso. He presumably derived his taste for comic drama from his uncle Alexis. The philosopher Aristotle Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BC) was a Greek philosopher, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology. Together with Plato and Socrates (Plato's teacher), Aristotle is one of the most wrote in his Poetics Aristotle's Poetics is the earliest-surviving work of dramatic theory and the first extant philosophical treatise to focus on literary theory. In it, Aristotle offers an account of what he calls "poetry" (a term which in Greek literally meant "making" and in this context includes drama—comedy, tragedy, and the satyr play—as (c. 335 BC) that comedy is a representation of laughable people and involves some kind of blunder or ugliness which does not cause pain or disaster.[1] C. A. Trypanis Born in Chios, Greece, Trypanis received his education at The Classical Gymnasium, Chios and the Universities of Athens, Berlin and Munich. He received a doctorate from the University of Athens in 1937. From 1939-1945 he taught at the University of Athens and, in 1947, moved to Britain where he began teaching at Exeter College in Oxford as the as wrote that comedy is the last of the great species of poetry Greece gave to the world.[2]
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