Comedy’, from Greek komoidia, is a word with a complex cultural history. Its modern, as opposed to its ancient, use covers all formally marked varieties of performed humour, whether scripted or improvised, group or solo, in any medium: theatre, film, television, radio, stand-up, and various hybrids and mutations of these. It is also, by extension, applied more loosely to novels and other non-performance texts that share recognizable features of plot, theme, or tone with the classical tradition of comic drama; and used more loosely still as a casual synonym for humour’. As a countable noun, however, the word is restricted to works with a narrative line; thus sketch shows, stand-up, and variety acts can be comedy’ but not comedies’.

Although the competition for comedies at the Athenian City Dionysia was made official in 486, the genre itself is certainly older, probably by generations. In this much-discussed passage from the Poetics, Aristotle complains that his research into the early history of Attic drama was hampered in the case of comedy by a shortage of documentation, making it impossible to construct the kind of developmental history that he was able to piece together for tragedy. Only with the generation of Crates, whose career began around 450, did a clear sequence of innovation start to become traceable, and for the earlier period Aristotle himself seems to have been driven back on what would have appeared to him a plausible inference: that comedy had evolved in the same way as tragedy, from a pre-dramatic mode of performance through the separation of chorus and soloist. He saw a credible ancestor in the phallic songs’ performed at Dionysiac festivals around Attica, such as the one staged in Acharnians (237 ff.), and suggested that the lead voice in such processional songs (taken by Dicaeopolis in the Acharnians scene) was the origin of the comic solo actor.

After Aristophanes' Wealth (388), our next complete surviving comedy is Menander's Dyskolos from 316: a gap longer than the period spanned by our entire corpus of surviving tragedy. The lost lifetime of ‘Middle Comedy’ is far from a desert; though papyrus texts are scarce, quotations in later Greek texts are very numerous, with Athenaeus' ten-book dialogue Deipnosophistae or ‘Dinner-Party Scholars’ (c. 200 AD) a particularly rich source of snippets concerned with all aspects of food, drink, and the symposium – themes which, even allowing for Athenaeus' specialized interests, seem to have been unusually prominent in the comedy of the era. The relatively abundant fragments and titles fall tantalizingly short of allowing us to trace the evolution of the genre in detail, but it is clear that, by the time Menander began producing in 320 BC, the form and character of comedy had changed, and the long development of Athenian comedy had more or less stabilized. We do not see much further change over the course of Menander's career or in the surviving remains of plays from the following generation, and the plays of New Comedy, even the extant Menander, largely resist attempts at specific dating.

The origins of Roman comedy are, in one sense, clear-cut: at the Ludi Romani or Roman Games of September 240, a Romanized Tarentine Greek known as Lucius Livius Andronicus, who at some point also translated the Odyssey into Latin, produced the first Latin translations of Greek plays on a Roman stage. This firm date, for which we have Cicero's friend Atticus to thank, marks the beginning of the establishment of a practice of translating classic Greek plays that would continue in both comedy and tragedy for at least a further century.

If Plautus had a real name, it seems never to have been known or inquired after. ‘Titus Maccius Plautus’ means something like ‘Willy McBozo Greasepaint’, and the disquieting proliferation of variants in the manuscripts is the equivalent of indecision over whether ‘McBozo’ should be spelled with a ‘Mac-’ and a small B. Plautus is a variant form of planipes (‘flatfoot’), attested as a nickname for performers in the barefoot Latin mime; Maccius means ‘son of Maccus’, the buffoonish hero of the Oscan fabula Atellana; while even the innocuous-looking praenomen Titus was used as a pet name for the male organ of business. The strong theatrical connections are nevertheless suggestive in the light of the ancient biographical tradition on Plautus, which is a shaky-looking edifice, but on one striking central point, there seems never to have been any doubt in antiquity: unlike other early Roman dramatists, Plautus came to the writing of plays not as a poet but as a professional man of the theatre. In contrast to his contemporaries Naevius and Ennius, he specialized in a single dramatic genre, and it may be his indifference to epic and tragedy in particular that kept him out of the aristocratic patronage and politics in which the careers of others were enmeshed.

Publius Terentius Afer is a remarkably well-documented figure about whom we nevertheless know next to nothing with any certainty. We have a reasonably secure documentary core in the didascaliae, the production notices attached to the plays in the manuscript tradition, whose information on original performances has survived the occasional sceptical attempts at unpicking; these give not only date, festival, producer, and aediles or other commissioning magistrates, but Greek source, and even the name and owner of the slave who composed the music and which type of reed-pipes it was played on. There is also Donatus' commentary, though frustratingly shredded and reconstituted in the form in which we have it, which also preserves invaluable, if sometimes puzzling, information about the Greek source plays and their adaptation. But Terence himself remains an enigma. Suetonius' biography of Terence, one of only four survivors from his Lives of the Poets, is a rich and still underinvestigated document, but it tells us less about Terence's life than it does about the biographical tradition that grew up around him a century after his death.