Virginia Mastellari – författare

The contributions included in this volume deal with the indirect tradition of classical Greek texts in anthologies, lexica and scholia. The innovative approach taken consists in considering the indirect sources as texts worth studying in their own right, rather than as repositories of older, more important texts. The indirect tradition in scholarly literature is thus considered in terms of its broader historical and cultural implications.

While Menander has long stood as the emblematic figure of Greek New Comedy, recent scholarship has increasingly challenged this Menandrocentric view by re-examining the broader landscape of comic production in the late-Classic and Hellenistic period. This volume brings to the fore the fragmentary remains of Menander’s contemporaries—such as Philemon, Diphilus, Apollodorus and others—offering new insights into their character typologies, linguistic style, and political engagement. Through philological, literary, and reception-oriented approaches, the contributions in this book reevaluate long-standing assumptions about the genre. The volume not only recontextualizes New Comedy within its historical and literary frameworks but also sheds light on its impact on Roman comedy. By expanding the canon beyond Menander, this study provides classicists, philologists, and literary historians with a more nuanced and comprehensive understanding of the genre's complexity and cultural significance.

The anthology deals with fragments of Greek literature and their contexts.

The Italian-language volume offers a commentary on the fragments and testimonies of twelve Greek comedy poets of the 4th century BC: Kalliades, Kallikrates, Klearchus, Kratinos the Younger, Krobylos, Heniochos, Herakleides, Eubulides, Euphanes, Euthias, Euthykles and Mnesimachos. The selection represents a representative cross-section and makes it possible to shed light on the development of the comedy genre, the themes and the motifs in comparison to the preceding and following comedy production. The mockery of some schools of philosophy, especially the followers of Pythagoras, parody of myths, the presence of 'stock characters' such as the sullen, the glutton, the hetaera or the cook, the mockery of strangers because of their customs, habits and certain linguistic features are constitutive features Recognize special features, catalogs of dishes and the associated erotic ambiguities. By commenting on these comedy poets, the communis opinio could be refuted that the comedy of the 4th century BC Was disinterested in political, current issues.