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W. Geoffrey Amott. Alexis: The Fragments; A Commentary. Cambridge Classical Texts and Commentaries, 31. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp. xxi + 886. $175.00.
The Greek comic poet Alexis appears to have lived for a century or thereabouts, from the 370s to the 270s B.C., and an entry in a Byzantine dictionary records that he composed 245 comedies. The figure is probably no exaggeration: titles of 137 different plays are preserved in ancient sources, and in addition to the 260-odd fragments assignable to these comedies, there are seventy-five or so more that cannot be attributed to an identifiable work. Even over so long a life span, it is unlikely that Alexis wrote exclusively for production at the two major comic festivals in Athens. Arnott suggests (15) that some of his plays may have been staged in rural Attica, but it is plausible that he composed at least occasionally for the professional traveling troupes, like the so-called "Artists of Dionysus," that brought Athenian comedy to theaters throughout the Greek-speaking world in the fourth and third centuries B. C. (see Niall Slater, "The Fabrication of Comic Illusion," in Beyond Aristophanes: Transition and Diversity in Greek Comedy, ed. G. Dobrov [1995], 29-45).
The active career of Alexis spanned the eras of Middle Comedy and New Comedy, as they were dubbed by Hellenistic scholars. Old Comedy is represented for us by the eleven surviving plays of Aristophanes: the plots are based on extravagant schemes concocted by wily and irrepressible heroes and heroines such as Lysistrata, who inaugurates an international women's sex strike in order to end the war between Athens and Sparta. New Comedy, which we know chiefly through the plays of Menander and the Latin adaptations of Plautus and Terence, dealt mainly with middle-class domestic life and above all the complications resulting from adolescent infatuations. About the nature of Middle Comedy...