ABSTRACT This collection brings into sustained dialogue three fields rarely considered together: Greek comedy, fragmentary texts, and cognitive approaches to literature and performance. It asks what changes when comic fragments are treated not simply as incomplete texts awaiting reconstruction, but as traces of theatrical and cognitive experiences shaped by bodies, emotions, memories, objects, spaces, and imagination. Comedy is especially productive for such an inquiry. As performance, it depended on actors, spectators, material environments, cultural knowledge, and expectation; as a corpus largely preserved in fragments, it now requires modern readers to reconstruct precisely these interactions from radically incomplete evidence. Fragmentation itself therefore becomes cognitively productive, activating memory, inference, visualization, affect, and imaginative completion. The contributions explore this intersection through memory, emotion, immersion and disruption, material agency, space, and spectatorship, while remaining alert to the methodological uncertainties involved in reconstructing both ancient performance and our modern encounters with its fragmentary remains.
ABSTRACT This is the introductory article for a special issue of the Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies on the topic of ‘Dynasty in the Roman Empire: Politics, Rhetoric, Representation’. The issue’s title encapsulates our three entangled foci: the politics of dynastic strategies and negotiations and their impact; the rhetorical construction of dynasty through names, titles, and relationships; and the representational strategies and responses by different actors and agents. This article functions both as the Introduction to the special issue and an interrogation of Roman definitions, terminology, and concepts of dynasty deployed between the late first century BCE and the sixth century CE. Our aim is to test whether or not two key etic definitions of dynasty drawn from modern scholarship—its corporate nature (‘a kinship-based community of stakeholders in public authority’) and its seriality (‘a succession of rulers of the same line or family’)—can be applied to the Roman Empire.
ABSTRACT This article explores the impact of Roman dynastic developments and expectations upon the individuals directly involved: the members of the imperial family themselves. It highlights the ways in which Roman families—and particularly imperial families—promoted public consciousness of their ancestry and deeds and the pressure this placed on later generations to live up to and further these traditions. Tracing such developments from the Republic through to the Late Empire, the paper sheds light on the immense demands made of both male and female members of imperial families to live up to military, political, social and reproductive demands across more than four centuries of Roman rule.
ABSTRACT This article explores how cognitive-psychological studies of mental ‘scene development’ and ‘scene maintenance’ invite a reassessment of conventional understandings of theatrical space in ancient drama. By analysing dramatic texts not against the objective and extensive backdrop of the ‘set’ theatrical stage, but rather in terms of dynamic neural processes (wherein the addition and removal of conceptual objects develop, maintain, and ultimately dissolve a mental ‘scene’), this cognitively inflected approach to staging highlights the crucial importance of three-dimensional local space, as experienced in both the theatre and ‘the mind’s eye’. The framework of mental scene development not only opens up brief comic fragments to performance analysis, it also casts new light on longstanding questions about the Protean ‘spacecraft’ of Aristophanic drama in general. This article studies the cognitive effects of scene-defining objects in the comic fragments (Ar. frr. 130, 169, 545, and 546) alongside analogues in fully extant Aristophanic plays (Ach. 723–728) to suggest that the scenic materials of Athenian Old Comedy contributed to spectators’ minds no less than their eyes.
Abstract How clever were the spectators of fifth-century comedy? After suggesting that audience addresses in Aristophanes and fifth-century comic fragments are all underpinned by the strategy of making the spectators cleverer than they are (whatever their ‘pre-existing condition’ was), I propose to focus on the ways in which inefficient spectators are represented in Aristophanes’s Ecclesiazousai and, furthermore, how the external audience (as a diverse body of subgroups, from privileged to low backgrounds) is trained to outperform their limited competences. Spectators are invited to collectively show better sense than the bad viewers featuring on stage, in dramaturgic settings which favour the ‘observation of observations’ and, thus, self-reflexivity. In ancient comedy, the definition of intelligence (as applied to spectators) is a constructivist one, situated (e.g. dependent on a specific, material and embodied context) and collaborative.
