Fiction and Ancient Comedy
So I've begun this blog so I can get all of the academic dreams and thoughts still rattling around in my brain out there. Just because I didn't get the PhD doesn't mean all of these thoughts are completely invalid. They are just underdeveloped, like me as an scholar.
So...my dissertation was going to be about how Aristophanes uses the chorus in each play to establish the relationship between the divine and mundane within the fiction of the play, as well as how much bleed-through there was between the boundary of the theater and the people watching as audience vs. worshipper for each of his plays.
And I think it is the real lynchpin of the fictionality of it all, and it makes me wonder about the very beginning of fiction. I'm defining fiction as a genre where the stories are not at all believed to be real or factual. Not urban legends, not hymns to gods, but fully imaginary. When was the first of those? Greek comedy? Drama? Satyr plays? Or earlier, the myths of the first civilizations, or maybe in Asia?
I was looking at the Epic of Gilgamesh, and it feels like fiction, except how much was believed to be an actual story of the past? Need to see what scholars think about this.
All of this to say I have a suspicion that Ancient Greek Comedy is early in that timeline. I want to believe it is the first truly fictional piece, because how beautiful would it be if the first time people branched out from what was known and made up their own stories, it was to make each other laugh?
