Identifying legal or quasi-legal scenarios in New Comedy is a useful tool for interpretation: it provides a context for understanding the not always straightforward conduct of characters on the forensic stage. In this last chapter, I attempt to show how we can apply the paradigms of two scenarios, entrapment and framing, to other situations which are not strictly related to legal or even quasi-legal procedures for settling disputes.

Entrapment, in modern American criminal jargon, takes place when an officer of the law or an undercover agent actively entices an individual to commit an offense in order to obtain evidence to use against him in a criminal prosecution; it is illegal when the methods used to obtain the evidence are such as “to create a substantial risk that the offense would be committed by a person not otherwise disposed to commit it.” In ancient Athens, the contours of entrapment are different: there is of course no public prosecutor who might initiate such a plan and hence no law proscribing such conduct on the part of “public servants.” But adversaries in Athens did engage in similar unwholesome tactics against one another and their aim in doing so, as we shall see, resembles that of the modern undercover agent: to bring a “past offender” to justice by enticing him to commit a crime for which solid evidence can be presented in a court of law. The “past offender” trapped in this way in Athens need not be a person who has committed an illegal offense before the entrapment; he may have only personally offended his adversary in some earlier dispute.