Comedy on Agriculture and the Blessings of Peace

Abstract This chapter explores the idealizing of the Attic countryside in Old Comedy and the blending of agriculture, comic gods, festivals, and peace into a comic version of Athens that had markedly different objectives, particularly during the Peloponnesian War, from the real polis in which comedy was produced. In this version of the comic polis, war is rejected and the protagonist and his entourage enjoy sympotic pleasures and the festivals of Dionysus. These festive symposia anticipate the full treatment of the comic symposium in Chapter 5.