LAUGH TRACKS. GREEK COMEDY IN PTOLEMAIC EGYPT is a project funded by the Italian Ministry of the University and Research programme “Research Projects of National Relevance” PRIN 2022. Research units at Genoa (PI: Serena Perrone), Bari (Tiziana Drago) and Cagliari (Felice Stama) Universities.
Ptolemaic Egypt played a major role in the tradition of classical Greek literary production. Papyrological findings, preserved in Egypt due to the climate there, significantly enlarge our knowledge of this production, a vast amount of which did not survive via mediaeval transmission. The collection of texts in the Library at Alexandria and the Alexandrian philological work on them (which itself shaped the texts) were part of the political agenda of the Ptolemies. In a multicultural context such as Hellenistic Egypt, that meant constructing a self-identity based on the cultural heritage of a glorious past, preserving it, studying it and creating something new on that base.
THE OBJECTIVES OF THE PROJECT
Against this background, the project focuses on comedy, since theater was a typical Greek activity that had a wide impact on Egypt in the course its Hellenization, due to the persistence of performative occasions alongside reading and study on elite social levels. The main aim is to outline a cultural history of the reception of Comedy in a context that proved crucial for the tradition of classical culture as a whole, investigating the mutual influence of Ptolemaic Egypt on the transmission of Greek Comedy, and the heritage of Greek Comedy on new literature produced in the same context. Through analysis of this cultural context, we will explore the tradition of the entire genre, including fragments of both known and unknown authorship (the latter being the majority).
The goal is not to analyse comic fragments per se, as pieces of literature, but to contextualise them in the framework of the material, conceptual and historical milieu of the archeological objects that preserve them.
THE RESEARCH WILL MOVE ALONG FOUR MAIN LINES OF INQUIRY
A survey of the papyrus finds, noting clues regarding the material aspects of text transmission in antiquity and the contexts, levels and kinds of production and dissemination of copies (database);
A critical edition, translation and commentary on the close to 50 comic fragments transmitted via Ptolemaic papyri (some of them not included in the standard reference edition, Kassel-Austin 1983-2001), which will for the first time combine a full analysis of their papyrological-bibliological and philological-literary aspects;
A study on the potential influence of Greek Comedy on the literature produced in Ptolemaic Egypt, and particularly mimetic genres, through case studies of Machon and Herondas;
An examination of the fragments of Alexandrian scholarship on Greek Comedy (citations of Alexandrian philologists in the long-lasting exegetic tradition down to the mediaeval scholia; fragments of Alexandrian treatises related to the comic genre) to outline its trends, attitudes, publication and exegetical methods, and selection criteria, as a significant example of the ancients' reflection on their cultural heritage.