Building on work we started during my 2009 Classical article that is quarterly”An Aristophanic Slave: Peace 819-1126″). The slave characters of the latest and Roman comedy have very long been the main topic of productive scholarly interest; here is their site slave characters in Old Comedy, by comparison, have obtained reasonably small attention (the only real substantial research being Stefanis 1980). Yet a better look during the ancestors for the subsequent, more familiar comic slaves provides brand brand new views on Greek attitudes toward sex and status that is social along with just just what an Athenian audience expected from and enjoyed in Old Comedy. More over, my arguments on how to read passages that are several slave characters, if accepted, may have bigger implications for the interpretation of specific performs.

The very first chapter sets the phase for the conversation of “sexually presumptive” slave characters by dealing with the notion of intimate relations between slaves and free ladies in Greek literature generally speaking and Old Comedy in specific. We first examine the various (non-comic) remedies for this theme in Greek historiography, then its exploitation for comic impact within the 5th mimiamb of Herodas as well as in Machon’s Chreiai. Finally, we argue that humorous sources to intimate relations between slaves and free feamales in the extant comedies blur the line between free and slave so that you can keep an even more rigid distinction between relatively rich Athenian resident men and a reduced class comprising slaves, metics, foreigners, as well as the poorest Athenian residents.