The Feast of Poetry

This book explores the comic transformations of sacrifices and feasts to propose a new understanding of the function of Aristophanic comedy. Situated at the intersection of various approaches to the comic genre, it adopts a synchronic viewpoint to focus on comedy within the dramatic festival of Dionysos. By inscribing Aristophanes' plays in the poetic and ritual traditions of Greece, it attempts to reconstruct a fifth-century view of the performance of comedy as a sacrificial offering that both honors the god and is shared by the assembled citizen body. Thus understood, comedy itself becomes the ideal feast for the democratic polis and at the same time effects a return to an imaginary utopian state where mortals and immortals coexist.