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Jeffrey Rusten (ed.). The Birth of Comedy: Texts, Documents, and Art from Athe- nian Comic Competitions, 486-280. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011. Pp. XX, 794. $110.00. ISBN 978-0-8018-9448-0.
With translations by Jeffrey Henderson, David Konstan, Ralph Rosen, Jeffrey Rusten, and Niall W. Slater.
Thousands of fragments of Greek comedy survive, most of them preserved by authors of the Hellenistic and Roman periods, who cite them for philological or historical reasons. Much of this material-now readily available in the original language in Kassel-Austin's monumental Poetae Comici Graeci-has not been translated into English since J. M. Edmonds produced his Fragments of Attic Comedy half a century ago. Unlike Edmonds (who also provided his own Greek text). Rusten and his collaborators offer only a selection of fragments, omitting inter alia large numbers of one-word glosses and the like. But they also spread their net far wider, including the early fifth-century Sicilian comedies of Epich- armus, substantial amounts of inscriptional and vase-painting evidence, and nu- merous ancient testimonia to the histoiy and character of the genre. The result is a volume that will be of use to readers interested in the...