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POLITICS AND ANTI-REALISM IN ATHENIAN OLD COMEDY: THE ART OF THE IMPOSSIBLE. By I. A. Ruffell. Oxford: Oxford University Press (Oxford Classical Monographs). 2011. Pp. xii, 499.
Many academic books have a catchy main title and an informative subtitle: this one has a subtitle that is both catchy and informative, and a main title that is dull and rather misleading. The book is precisely about Old Comedy as "the art of the impossible"-about its exploitation of what others have termed fantasy or the absurd, described (427) as "the principle [sic] means of engineering the conceptual and political positioning of comic plays." But the reader who hopes that this study will throw light on the "political positioning" of one or another comic drama or dramatist is going to be disappointed. Such conclusions as are reached are conventional (Acharnions is propeace, Knights is cynical about the political process), though there is a strong reluctance to accept that Aristophanes might have harboured anti-democratic prejudices. Birds, it seems, has something to do with "the nature of imperialism" (428), but we never learn what kinds of fresh ideas about the nature of imperialism a spectator would be likely to take away with him from the theatre, or how he would acquire them, except for a brief reference (303) to the scene of the Inspector and the Decree-Seller. Ruffell, with his great familiarity with modern varieties of comedy, many of them overtly politicalwhich he puts to excellent use throughout-would be, one feels sure, very well placed to suggest answers to such questions; he has clearly made a policy decision that in general he will not do so. And "anti-realism," suggesting as it does the deliberate avoidance of anything resembling reality, is perhaps not quite the motjuste-, as Ruffell well shows us, Old Comedy does not so much suppress the real as it delights in the...