In previous chapters, I have attempted to identify the mark the poetic agon left on Aristophanes' comedies, not only by examining stray remarks that directly invoke this feature of Athenian dramatic performance, but by identifying themes deeply woven into the poetic fabric of the plays that resonate with their competitive background. This relationship is made more explicit in Frogs, in which an actual poetic contest forms the culminating sequence of events on which the outcome hinges. Performed at the Lenaia of 405, Frogs responds to the general state of crisis in which Athens found itself. The war against Sparta and her allies was going badly, for Athens' dwindling resources were impeding its ability to carry out military objectives. Adding gloom was the literary crisis that befell the city with the deaths first of Euripides and then of Sophocles. Although their degree of competitive success was very different, both men had been fixtures of the dramatic festivals for half a century. In an effort to articulate the significance of the “desperate” cultural situation occasioned by their deaths, in the first half of Frogs Aristophanes has the god of the Theater himself, Dionysos, attempt to save Athenian tragedy by descending to Hades to rescue Euripides. In the second half of the play, a change of plan is forced upon the god, who no sooner arrives in Hades than his services are required to decide whether Aeschylus or Euripides is the better poet.

In the description of Nestor's contingents in the Iliadic Catalogue of Ships, the geographical locale of Dorion provides the opportunity for a minor departure from the theme at hand: it was here that the Muses encountered the Thracian poet Thamyris (Il. 2.594–600), who had boasted that he could defeat anyone, even the goddesses of poetry themselves, if they competed in singing against him. The outcome was in some ways predictable: in anger, the Muses made Thamyris blind or dumb, deprived him of his wondrous song, and made him forget the art of kithara-playing. Thamyris' punishment, in other words, reverses the typical encounter in which the Muses bestow their gifts personally upon an aspiring poet-musician. Within the Iliad, his situation stands in stark contrast with Homer's own thriving relationship with the Muses, on prominent display in the Catalogue itself, with its own elaborate invocation (Il. 2.484–93) that enables the singer to overcome the difficulty his material poses. As Andrew Ford in particular has noted, Thamyris provides a kind of aitiology for poetic agonism, and in this sense the story might imply that formal poetic competitions extended back well before Homer's own time. At the very least, we can say that Thamyris in Homer signifies the trajectory for what became a dominant social ambience for poetic performance in the seventh and sixth centuries, as formal programs of poetic competition were established at festivals in cities and cult places throughout Greece.

The curious production history of Clouds claimed scholarly attention already at the library in Alexandria. From an ancient hypothesis, we learn that the play failed miserably at its first performance at the Dionysia of 423. Dismayed at this reverse, the same source reports, and convinced that his audience had failed to appreciate the play's merits, Aristophanes undertook a revision in the hope of allowing them to correct their error. The play we have is the revised version, and in its parabasis Aristophanes comments on the circumstances that necessitated a second effort. Modern scholars have been eager to determine the nature, date and extent of Aristophanes' revisions for what they can tell us about the original play, only a few fragments of which survive. Our clearest insight into these problems is provided by another hypothesis (Hyp. I), which describes the second Clouds as “the same as the former” (τοῦτο ταὐτóν ἐστι τῷ προτέρῳ), but then goes on to describe changes affecting nearly every part of the play (καθóλου μὲν οὖν σχεδὸν παρὰ πᾶν μέρος γεγενημένη <ἡ> διóρθωσις), with some passages (parabasis, agon of the Arguments, finale) identified as entirely new to the revised play. While these considerations will affect the discussion at some points, by and large this study will concern itself with the original Clouds only to the extent necessary to understand the circumstances of the revision. Nor do I assume that our Clouds necessarily bears much resemblance to its predecessor.

Among the things for which Pericles congratulates his fellow Athenians in his funeral oration is the number of festivals they celebrated during the year. With contests and sacrifices (Th. 2.38 ἀγῶσι μέν γε καὶ θυσίαις), he says, these occasions provided a pleasure (τέρψις) that momentarily banished day-to-day hardships (τὸ λυπηρόν). During the cold, rainy months of winter, the various Dionysian festivals that extended from December through March must have been a major source of communal and personal joy. Although in the case of the dramatic contests the terpsis to which Pericles alludes may have derived from the audience's simple enjoyment of the individual productions, it is also certain that the Athenians were invested in the outcome of the competitions themselves. Plato condemns the kind of “theatrocracy” that came to dominate the poetic agon, and Plutarch recalls an occasion when the audience was heatedly divided in their support of Aeschylus and the young Sophocles, leading the presiding archon, in a moment of administrative inspiration, to adapt festival protocol by replacing the normal ten judges with the ten generals in order to lend authority to a decision that would inevitably meet with disapproval from a large segment of the audience.

Aristophanes would not disappoint his audience's festive expectations at the Lenaia of 425, where comedy appears to have been the privileged genre. Acharnians caters fully to Athenian pride in the festival celebrations, by including within its plot not one but two festivals of Dionysos, the Rural Dionysia and the Anthesteria.

To later readers of Old Comedy, the Lenaia of 425, at which Acharnians was produced, must have seemed a remarkable occasion. Competing were the three poets who eventually became the undisputed triumvirate of fifth-century comedy: Cratinus, Eupolis, and Aristophanes (Ach. Hyp. I. 32–4). Cratinus, whose career was now most likely entering its fourth decade, was undoubtedly the preeminent comic poet of his generation, with eight of his nine career victories probably behind him at this point. His preeminent position would soon be claimed, however, by two younger rivals. Eupolis debuted in 429 and within a few years was victorious at the Lenaia, possibly in 426, the year before Acharnians was performed. Aristophanes produced his first play in 427 and almost certainly won his first contest one year later, at the City Dionysia in 426 with Babylonians. In short, the comic agon at the Lenaia of 425 brought together the finest talent of the period, and we can only imagine the mixed feelings of excitement and trepidation with which Aristophanes awaited the competition, and his sense of accomplishment when Acharnians was awarded the prize.

The importance of Aristophanes' victory with Acharnians for his identity as a competitive poet can be measured by an examination of Knights, the play with which he returned to the Lenaia in 424. In both a thematic and formal sense, Knights is the most agonistic of the surviving Aristophanic comedies.

The slight against Cratinus through the theme of record-keeping argued for in Chapter 3 may be more personal than I suggested, for a precedent perhaps exists in one of Cratinus' own plays. We have a single trochaic tetrameter from Didaskaliai, and although working with fragmentary plays is always challenging, the title makes speculation tempting. Didaskaliai incorporates a professional term for dramatic production, and it thus appears that in this comedy Cratinus, like Aristophanes in the Knights parabasis, reflected openly on matters pertaining to the production of his plays. The content of the fragment provides further reason to believe that this was so:

The addressee is apparently consoled for failing to impress in a poetic display. The term for poetry, thriamboi, is identified by Hesychius and other ancient sources as equivalent to “dithyramb,” the choral genre originally associated with Dionysian worship. Given the report elsewhere that Cratinus adopted this form in his comedies (fr. 20) in a passage where ad hominem abuse was in evidence, it is a reasonable conclusion that with thriamboi he had in mind the vituperative comic mode for which he became notorious. Support for that position can be found in a lurking allusion to Archilochus' assertion about the connection between wine and dithyramb (fr. 120W2), since Cratinus cultivated a connection with Archilochus as a feature of his poetic identity.

How dramatic poetry came to be associated with Dionysos and his festivals is a complicated question with no clear answer. What is certain is that by the time our evidence allows us to speak of tragedy and comedy as well-defined and distinct literary genres, they are included in a program of direct competition at Dionysian festivals. It would appear that the poetic agon was to some degree responsible for putting the genres on the cultural map, even if their cultic significance and literary antecedents go back well before this. For tragedy, official recognition came in the later part of the sixth century; for comedy we can be more precise: the first victory belonged to the all-but-forgotten Chionides in 486. Thereafter, Dionysian competitions were the occasion for dramatic production in Athens, so that by the time Aristophanes began writing comedies the genre had been embedded in an agonistic context for about sixty years. Regardless of comedy's form and character when Chionides practiced it, over the course of the fifth century the constant subjection of the productions to direct competition must have fostered experimentation and adaptation by individual poets. What we know as comedy through Aristophanes is thus likely quite distinct from its earlier form, though any assessment of the genre's development must leave room for the dynamic of innovation operating through the re-expression of a tradition.