FrC 16.4 Epikrates – Eriphos

This book is the first comprehensive study ever devoted to the comic poets Epicrates, Epigenes, and Eriphus, figures previously known only through scattered quotations from later sources. The volume studies their fragments for the first time, reconstructs the lost plays and restores these playwrights to the history of Greek comedy. A ground-breaking contribution is the correct dating of Epigenes to New Comedy, the final phase of Greek Comedy, overturning a long-standing error that had shaped scholarship since the nineteenth century. By combining close reading with cultural and historical analysis, the book shows how these poets engaged with everyday life, politics, and social values in post-Classical Athens. Rather than treating fragments as isolated curiosities, it reveals them as parts of coherent dramatic worlds and as evidence for major developments in comic form and content. The volume enhances and deepens our understanding of how the genre evolved after the classical age.