Chapter Four Didymus and comedy

Abstract

Didymus’ commentaries on the comic playwrights and his Comic Vocabulary responded to the interests of the readership of Attic comedy primarily in two ways: by summarizing the opinions of previous scholars and by offering a wide range of explanations, useful also to less specialized readers. Although his exegesis of comedy is now preserved only through quotations (mainly in the scholia to Aristophanes), it is still possible to identify the main features and interests of Didymus’ interpretative work and highlight its relevance for both ancient and contemporary readers of Greek comedy.