Antimachus of Colophon and the Position of Women in Greek Poetry

The classification of Greek Comedy has been, from the earliest times, a subject of dispute. The ancient critics, for the most part, divided comedy into two classes only—the Old Comedy, which has aparabasis, and the New Comedy, which has none. According to these critics, the acme of the Old Comedy was reached during the Peloponnesian War, that of the New Comedy during the reign of Alexander. That this system of classification, though sound as far as it goes, is not an adequate one, will be admitted by every student of the subject, and need not be further discussed. The alternative division of comedy into three classes, corresponding roughly to the sixth, seventh, and eighth so-called periods of Greek literature—a scheme of arrangement that has on the whole been most generally accepted in modern times—is also not a very satisfactory one; for, apart from the initial objection that it, like all similar chronological arrangements, is far too rigid to be applied to anything so intangible as a literary tendency, there is the further and graver objection that there is really no essential difference whatever between the comedies performed at Athens during the reign of Philip and those performed there in the time of Alexander.

The Orge of Menander, produced in the year after the death of the latter monarch, might have been produced, as far as one can judge of its character by its remains, in any year of the previous fifty.

At the same time, however, it is certain that a division of comedy into three classes rather than two is necessary; for that the work of, say, Apollodorus Carystius, differs as much from that of Antiphanes as anything the latter ever wrote does from the work of Eupolis, is a fact that no one acquainted with the subject is likely to question.

The only satisfactory system of classification is that based, not on style or chronology, but on subject. Greek comedy falls naturally into three great divisions—the Political, the Social, and the Romantic, and, to come at once to the point, these three divisions are characterised by three distinct ways of regarding women. The Political Comedy practically ignores women altogether; the Social Comedy admits the fascination of woman’s society as an incident in a man’s life; the Romantic Comedy claims woman’s love as the one topic of absorbing interest for men.

And here it may at once be observed that the relation between the first two forms of art is somewhat different from that which exists between them and the last. The Social Comedy was the natural and logical development of the original primitive comedy, and the Comedy of Cratinus, with its political motive, was but a temporary branch of the art, which, though growing at one time to such striking proportions as well nigh to conceal the parent stem, yet never actually prevented the growth and development of the latter. The Romantic Comedy, on the other hand, was the result, not of development, but of revolution. It was a deliberate attempt (undertaken in the first instance, it would seem, by a single man of genius) to inoculate the old Athenian drama with those romantic ideas which were by this time beginning to be freely expressed in various other parts of Greece, and to combine the teaching of the epic erotic legends, which were in essence ideal, with the realism of Social Comedy.