THE GENERAL ARGUMENT

Legal historians and philologists use New Comedy as a source to illustrate (and sometimes to prove) the existence and functioning of particular laws in Athenian and Roman society. Their investigations appear to have an ancient pedigree: the Peripatetic Eumelos in the third book of his treatise Concerning Ancient Comedy (Περὶ της ἀρχαίας κωμωιδίας) reported that “no one after the arkhonship of Eukleides is to have a share in the polis, unless he prove that both his parents are astoi; but those before Eukleides are to be left unexamined.” While we do not know in what precise context Eumelos cited this important law, it is tempting to imagine the Peripatetic writing in his study, adding notes on Athenian law in order to explain some more or less obscure point – possibly of chronology – in one of the texts of Old Comedy. Modern legal historians have had two traditional and overlapping spheres of interest in New Comedy – indeed, the first is (but has not always been) a prerequisite for the second: (i) they have examined the corpus of New Comedy in order to categorize its information about law and to develop methodologies for its proper use; and (2) they have focused on particular subjects of law (e.g., sale, theft, marriage, adultery, divorce, and the epiklerate system) which surface in the multifarious plots of New Comedy and have tried to establish their Greek or Roman provenance.