(Pseudo)biografie dei poeti tragici nei frammenti della commedia greca di V e IV sec. a.C.

Our main information about the contemporary reaction to the fifth-century tragedians comes from the ancient Comedy, mainly from Aristophanes. We cannot be sure to what extent the jokes and remarks reflect the more or less general opinion of the actual audience, or the comedians’ own critical judgement, or whether they should be regarded primarily as caricatures intended to provoke laughter. Greek comedy essentially creates a public image of individual poets, undoubtedly exaggerated and distorted, but possibly based on real characteristics of both the character and his or her poetic style that could be recognised by the audience. This configures the information we have as “pseudo-biographies”. Since we only have the Vitae of the three great tragedians, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and none of the so-called “minor” tragedians, and since, with the exception of some epigraphic information, the only information we have about these poets is basically some allusions found in comic texts, it is obviously difficult to determine not only who these playwrights really were, but also how much comedy influenced (our) perception of tragedy. The purpose of this dissertation is to analyse how tragic poets were represented in the fragmentary Greek comedy of the V-IV centuries BC. The main aim is to identify the biographical and “pseudo-biographical” information on sixteen tragic poets that emerges from a corpus of fragments from the Old and Middle Comedy. As a general introduction, a section on the concept of “pseudo-biography” is offered, focusing on the debate about literary (tragic) culture at the end of the fifth century BC. This is followed by a history of studies on the subject, focusing on editions, commentaries and encyclopaedic works, with an emphasis on comic and tragic fragments and the figures of “minor” tragic and comic poets. A description of methodological issues concludes this section. The second part of the dissertation offers an individual discussion of the sixteen tragic poets who are explicitly mentioned in the corpus of texts. This section includes ancient testimonia (in Greek or Latin) on each poet and a synthesis of the information contained in both the testimonia and the comic texts analysed. The third part presents the corpus of fragments, with a critical apparatus, a metrical analysis and a translation into Italian. It includes a systematic commentary on each fragment: a brief bibliography; a discussion of the title, content and chronology of the comic play; the citation context; the constitution of the text; the interpretation of the fragment with relevant lemmata. All the fragments are arranged thematically according to the three categories and thirteen subcategories that emerge from the texts: 1) the Art of the Poet: the mediocre Poet; the tasteless Poet; the erotic/lascivious Poet; the talkative Poet; the praiseworthy Poet; the sweet Poet; poetic “fanaticism”; poetic collaboration/imitation; 2) Ethos: the opsophagos Poet; the effeminate Poet; the stingy Poet; 3) Genos: the foreign Poet; the slender/sickly Poet. In order to facilitate consultation of the work, the thesis contains four indexes.