Greek Comedy’S Parody of Lament

Abstract This essay analyzes the parody of lament in Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazusae, and discusses how lament is represented in a comic context and what this tells us about the lament genre. Much of current scholarship on lament focuses on reconstructing ritual lamentation based on evidence from early Greek epic poetry and Classical tragedy. As it has been argued, lament in epic poetry fulfils an important position of complement to heroic activity and “becomes the linguistic and generic inverse of heroic kleos.”1 Likewise, in elegy and tragedy it forms an integral part of the protagonists’ situation.