Marzo 27 de 2023 Parece ser que el verano no se quiere ir . Es que aún está de pie entregando terribles jornadasde calor tanto de día con fuerte sol o en esas noches de un cielo vestido con luz de luna y un sinfin de estrellas que titilan para hacerse ver . Hay días que negros nubarrones se muestran en loalto  y las miradas, deseosas de consuelo , atrapan de inmediato esa clara sensación de alegríaexpresando con alivio:" qué suerte, ya viene la lluvia" pero, ¡no!.De repente la brisa llega ycorre esas nubes dejándolas en los Valles detrás de los cerros entre relámpagos y fuertes lluviasdesbordando ríos, inundando  poblaciones y olvidándose del llano que la espera para mitigartanto calor mientras aquella rosa del jardín no quiere morir en su gajo y cada mañana másresiliente que nunca sola y  hermosa no pierde su fragancia, ni su color,  ni uno de sus pétalos apesar del fuego de los rayos del sol.Parece ser que el verano se niega a marcharse y a las puertas del final de su camino , el otoñoestá a la espera para poder entrar  pero los días y las noches pasan y todo sigue igual.Camino sofocada por las calles de mi ciudad y busco entre los aleros, entre los toldos, entre lasgalerías bajo su techo cobijarme y así esconderme un poco desorientando al sol. Solo escuchoparlantes de grupos que se manifiestan, tambores , bocinas de vehículos que van y que vienen ,las sirenas de las ambulancias, las voces de los vendedores ambulantes. Hay ruidos por todaspartes , peatones presurosos por cruzar las esquinas antes que se ponga el rojo del semáforo ,el silbato del varista , y alguien que discute con el conductor del otro vehículo porque le tocó apenas el auto al pasar.El verano está tardando en dejar ese lugar y el otoño que espera ,es un andante nostálgico quetrae consigo recuerdos que no han de hacerse realidad porque ya están muy adentro delcorazón de quienes los tienen. Mientras espera su oportunidad en su equinoccio , un solemneADAGIO DEL OTOÑO se comienza a mostrar en sus primeras hojas cuando entre suavescontorneos de danzas y danzas a los pies del árbol deciden descansar.Camino por las calles de mi ciudad. Siento dentro mío esa enorme necesidad de que apaguen elmundo y enciendan la música  porque mi alma melancólica necesita escuchar esa suavemelodía que hasta ella llegue y la embriague de felicidad.                                           Raquel C. Zurita.. 

 Todos los dias, experimento ese deseo incontrolable,de  saborar  tu aroma, tu cuerpo fuerte, intenso, plena, placidamente  dandole satisfaccion a mi paladar,sentirte tan cerca, tan mio.Alimentas mis lujurias, ansias desmedidaseh irrefrenables de poseerte, de acariciarte,en cada libar  con mis labios presurosos,por recibirte o deleitarse cuando te entregas,sin inhibiciones a mi.Eres esa droga deliciosa  que se escurre por,mi garganta, atrapando mis sentidos dispuestos,a perderse por la seduccion  de tu nectar diluyendose,en mi boca una y otra vez, Soy materia dispuesta y corro presurosa cuando,instuyo tu llamado que acaricia mi ego.Por las mañanas eres quien recibe mis amaneceres,mis tertulias, sueños, proyectos.Sos ese reflejo de accion, ese compañero dispuesto, a compartir  horas de silencios complices.Eres el placer hecho realidad.Ese Mate que me  da  su calor , su dulzura, delicias a mis dias. Sos parte de mi yo.   

Nuestras vidas, sin excepciones, están llenas de momentos de todo tipo. Hay momentos que nos han permitido enderezarnos cuando la caída era inminente; hay momentos que nos han botado derechamente sin capacidad de reaccionar; hay otros momentos gracias a los cuales hemos podido mantener equilibrios enfrente de los demás y que nos han ayudado en nuestra dignidad. Momentos gratos, sublimes… y momentos que mejor olvidarlos. Las personas pasamos por etapas en las cuales nos sentimos perfectamente balanceados, perfectamente equilibrados; pues bien, ese equilibrio siempre será consecuencia de momentos vividos sin que nos demos cuenta. Hay otras etapas, en cambio, en que nos derrumbamos y caemos a pesar de nuestros esfuerzos; de nuevo, todo causado por algún momento inadecuado e inoportuno. Por eso, mis queridos amigos, sepamos valorizar los momentos con que nos enfrentamos en nuestras vidas y sepamos aprovechar los buenos para crear sinergias mientras que evitemos esos momentos que nos sacan de centro llevándonos al caos. N. de la R. La redacción de este portal se ve en la obligación de advertir a los lectores de este post, que ¡su autor está chalado!... porque el escrito se refiere exclusivamente a los momentos físicos que se definen como el producto de una fuerza por una distancia y no a los momentos temporales. ¿Qué no ven que él es físico?    

ANCIENT ROMAN COMEDY Although no contemporaneous physical evidence for the floruit of Roman comic theater (ca. 210–160 BCE) survives, the extant plays of Plautus (d. 184 BCE) and Terence (d. 159 BCE), later artistic representations of Roman theater, and other testimony suggest that a large part of its humor was immediate and visual. Roman comedy’s elaborate semiotics of masks, costumes, and associated stock characters instantly marked a performance as comic, specifically in the tradition of the palliata or “play in Greek dress,” as Roman comedies based on Greek New Comedy models were called, and so neither tragic nor a form of native Italian Comedy. For example, at least some of Roman comedy’s clever slaves sported grotesque masks with megaphone mouths, red hair, and clown’s feet, while old men might be instantly recognizable from their walking sticks and exaggeratedly slow gait, and pimps by their colorful attire and goatish beards. Unusual plays, such as Plautus’s Amphitryon, the sole surviving ancient example of mythical travesty, called for unusual measures: There the extremely pregnant Alcmena, played by a male actor (as was the case for all roles in the palliata), was costumed accordingly and is made the target of a barrage of pregnancy and satiety jokes whenever she appears onstage. Use of Stage-Space in Roman Comedies The painted backdrops of the temporary Roman stages of this period featured one to three houses and could have humorously highlighted differences between, for example, the domiciles of pimps and upstanding citizens that often were juxtaposed in the comedies. The stage space, whatever its precise configuration, and the audience’s area themselves no doubt were manipulated for humorous effect, as in Roman comedy’s ubiquitous eavesdropping scenes, or in the comic routine featuring a “running slave,” who probably moved through the theater and onto the stage to bombastically and sometimes metacomically (e.g., Plautus, Amphitryon 984–990) demand that audience members give way so that he can deliver a message from town, the harbor, for example. Broad and physical humor was regularly enacted at center stage, as when Roman comedy’s über-pimp Ballio in Plautus’s Pseudolus repeatedly cracks his whip as he orders the members of his household to celebrate his birthday in an absurdly tyrannical song (133–229), or when the enforcers Sparax and Turbalio forcefully keep the pimp Labrax from absconding with Ampelisca and Palaestra in Plautus’s Rope (706–891). Even in Terence’s generally less boisterous comedy, there is considerable commotion onstage, as when in Adelphoe, the sanctimonious pimp Sannio is pummeled there (155–253), or with the arrival of the braggart soldier’s mock-heroic brigade of slaves armed with household implements at Eunuch 771ff. Three plays of Plautus—Persian (753ff.), Pseudolus (1246ff.), and Stichus (641ff.)— end in scenes of drunkenness and dancing. While details are largely lost, it is clear that the complex synesthesia created by Roman comedy’s stage business amused its audiences in myriad ways. Plots of Roman Comedy The plots of Roman comedy, along with the characters it inherited from Greek New Comedy, were stereotypical and offered limited options for development, circumscribed as they were by established motifs, patterns of action, conventions, and expected behaviors that could be endlessly repeated. Maurizio Bettini reduces the plots of the 20 extant plays of Plautus to a fundamental opposition between possession and desire, which involves a transfer of goods and articulation of two basic themes: the distribution of women and the distribution of wealth. Most commonly, a female (a prostitute or a potentially free, marriageable person) is sought by a young man in love (adulescens) with the aid of a clever slave (servus callidus), a trusted subaltern who eagerly transgresses social norms to help secure his young master’s beloved. The typical obstacles to this “acquisition” include a pimp (leno), a soldier (miles) or some other rival, as well as a parsimonious patriarch (senex). 36 Ancient Roman Comedy While the outcomes of plots were fixed and predictable, there was scope for creative reworking of some plot elements and especially the character types themselves, in that those stock characters always could be written still larger than their real-life counterparts. Thus, in Plautus’s Merchant the adulescens Charinus mawkishly delivers a catalogue of love’s vices, which include not only “Anxiety, pain, and over-refinement” (19), but also “Insomnia, work, wandering, fright, and flight; / Foolishness, stupidity, and irrationality on top of all that, / Brainless insensitude and lack of control, / Recklessness and passion, spitefulness, / Slacking, greed, sloth, injustice, / Poverty, abuse, and financial loss, / And both nonand hyper-talkativeness” (25–31). Ballio ratchets up the stereotype of the avaricious pimp to new levels in a famous scene of ritualistic abuse (Pseudolus 357ff.) by welcoming a bombardment of insults with shocking aplomb, for example: CALIDORUS “Father-and-mother-beater!” BALLIO “Correction: father-and-mother-murderer. / Better that than having to feed them. Now, was that wrong?” (367–368). Plautus’s conventionally manipulative prostitute Phronesium in Truculentus is so mercenary that she vigorously asserts in song: “When I ponder it over in my heart, it’s a terrible lie that’s told about us women: / We are given far too little credit for being as wicked as we naturally are” (451–452). The vainglorious soldier is absurdly represented by Plautus’s Pyrgopolynices in Miles Gloriosus, who when asked the simple question, “Do you want anything else?” replies: “Yes, that I be no more handsome than I am, / seeing that my good looks bring me only trouble” (1086–1087). The senex Euclio in Plautus’s Pot of Gold is said to be so miserly that he places a bag over his mouth when sleeping, lest he suffer the loss of any air (302–303), for example. In addition to these well-over-the-top stereotypical characters, Roman comedy employed an assorted pack of clowns (bomolochoi), most often clever slaves or parasites, who were at hand to deflate an emotionally intense scene, as Sosia in Amphitryon, whose irreverent asides to the audience about Alcmena’s pregnant state undercut the seriousness of her husband Amphitryon’s charges of adultery against her and her earnest defense of her chastity throughout a potentially discomfiting scene (633–860). Metacomedy Metacomedy is an extensively utilized source of humor in Roman comedy. Literary self-awareness is a defining feature of Latin literature from its beginnings, given its derivative status from Greek literature, and the impulse to expose fictional constructs is perhaps all the stronger in a tightly circumscribed genre like Roman comedy. Plautine comedy has an especially pronounced tendency to broadcast its status as theater-in-the-process-of-being-performed: Characters often explicitly refer to the stock roles they are playing (e.g., Comedy of Asses 174–175; Pseudolus 1081–1083); comment on the audience’s reception of the play (e.g., Merchant 160; Carthaginian 1224); and directly refer to details of theatrical production (e.g., Curculio 462–466; Menaechmi 402–404). In Plautus’s Persian, the clever slave Toxilus enlists a parasite (Saturio) to lend him the use of his daughter in a scheme to entrap a pimp. When Saturio asks where he can obtain her necessary costume, Toxilus quips: “Get it from the stage-manager. / He’s obligated to provide it, as per the contract with the aediles” (the Roman officials who funded theater at public festivals) (160–161); the mise-en-abyme structure of this deceitful playwithin-the-play could not be clearer. Chrysalus in Plautus’s Two Bacchises unexpectedly merges a frivolous remark about a fellow actor’s skill with a critique of the performance of a famous contemporary actor in a previous play of Plautus’s: “It’s not hearing of his success that hurts me—it’s your acting. / Even though I love Epidicus as much as I do myself, / there’s no play I’d rather not see if Pellio’s in it” (213–215). There are marked differences between Terence and Plautus in their employment of metacomic effects. As the examples immediately above illustrate, Plautine characters reveal their theatrical underpinnings more frequently and explicitly than those of Terence, whose metacomic moves are more subtle. In Terence’s Andria, the senex Simo believes—mistakenly it turns out—that he is being duped by his clever slave Davus into believing that his son has impregnated another woman so that the son can escape marrying his father’s choice of a wife. Hearing her (actually) give birth offstage, a stock situation in New Comedy, Simo exclaims: “What! So soon? Ridiculous! Once she heard me / In front of the door she stepped it way up. / Your timing is a little off there, Davus” (474–476). Similar metacomic subtlety surrounds the figure of Parmeno, an aspiring clever slave in Terence’s Eunuch. Parmeno misjudges the character of Thais, Terence’s skillfully drawn “hooker with a heart of gold,” and arranges an elaborate ruse to allow his Ancient Roman Comedy 37 master Chaerea to gain access to Pamphila, a girl Thais has placed under her protection. The scheme results in the rape of the girl, which is brutally described by Chaerea during the play (580–605), and Parmeno is exposed as a bumbler when Thais’s slave Pythias misleads him into believing that Chaerea is being tortured and so tricks him into betraying his young master to his father, an egregious violation of the clever slave’s code (982–996). Adding metacomic insult to injury, Pythias pointedly gloats: “I actually used to think you were a very clever fellow” (1011), where the adjective callidus marks Parmeno’s utter failure to win the day as a clever slave directing an internal play. Illusion of Improvisation Another form of metacomedy that is widespread in Roman comedy, especially Plautus’s, is improvisation or, more precisely, the creation of an illusion of it within scripted drama. This device is most clearly illustrated by Plautus’s Pseudolus, a typical comedy in which the clever slave and the play’s namesake plot to obtain a beloved prostitute for his young master (Calidorus). The play opens with Pseudolus’s blustery promise to Calidorus that he has a foolproof plan to purchase the girl from Ballio, who has arranged to sell the girl to a soldier. Left alone on stage, Pseudolus informs the audience that he is clueless and must improvise: “Where to start weaving your web of deceit, / Or how to bring that design to completion? / But I’ll have to be just like a poet: / He takes up his tablet and though he searches for / What doesn’t exist at all, he still finds it, and / Makes complete fiction seem like the truth. / That’s it! I’ll become a poet and find / The twenty minae which are nowhere!” (399–405). “Poet” (poeta) here is both a generic word for “poet” and “playwright” in particular and points to Pseudolus’s larger theatrical power. Even though an abundance of stereotypical plots to “get the girl” is available to him, Pseudolus instead stresses the need for novelty within a circumscribed tradition, or as he puts it in a subsequent address to the audience: “Now, it’s the duty of every actor to be original / Enough to bring something original on stage: / If he can’t, let him step aside for someone who can” (568–570). Pseudolus even warns Calidorus’s father—the usual target for trickery of this kind—to be on the lookout for a scheme to defraud him of the needed cash (508–509). At roughly midplay, Pseudolus again playfully informs the audience that he has no plan: “I have a sneaking suspicion that you all suspect / I’ve only promised to do these daring deeds / In order to entertain you during this play, / And there’s little chance I’ll do what I promised . . .” (562–565). He then promises to devise a surefire scheme and leaves the stage empty, only to reappear shortly to triumphantly announce that he now has a concrete plan that is guaranteed to succeed (574–594). But as soon as Pseudolus’s celebratory song is finished, the soldier’s assistant fortuitously arrives, inspiring the slave to declare: “This new and sudden situation calls for a new and sudden solution. / First order of business: all my previous plans just flew out the window!” (601–602). A richly metatheatrical and ultimately successful play-within-the-play commences, and we never learn what Pseudolus’s supposedly ingenious plan was. Plautus has brilliantly duped his audience into believing that a scripted comedy is being improvised before their eyes. An equally vivid example of seeming improvisation on a smaller scale, and with a different tone and effect, occurs in Plautus’s Pot of Gold when the miser Euclio pathetically turns to audience members for information about his stolen treasure and even accuses them of the theft (713–725). Tragedy as a Target of Humor Tragedy based on Greek models flourished simultaneously with early comedy at Rome and so is a ready target of metatheatrical humor in Plautus and Terence. Plautus’s Rope even moves beyond mere mockery of the stilted language and sententiousness of tragedy (as it is seen through comic eyes) and engages it in a kind of dialogue, appropriately so in that Rope overtly addresses questions of human justice and fate (see especially the prologue). This process of pointedly juxtaposing the two genres is initiated in the opening scene when the gruff and uneducated country slave Sceparnio assesses the damage of the previous night’s storm through a reference to a scene from a lost tragedy of Euripides: “The wind unroofed the cottage! Did I say ‘wind’? / Hardly a wind, but it must have been an Alkmene of Euripides / That blew every last tile off the roof / And created all new light and windows for us!” (85–88). Throughout Rope, characters unexpectedly launch into tragic diction, as when the pimp’s friend and fellow shipwreck victim Charmides direly speculates about the girls they presume are lost at sea in the pronounced style of early Roman tragedy: “I believe they’re providing piscine provisions in the 38 Ancient Roman Comedy deep” (513). The question of whether or not comedy can, as with tragedy, engage in serious discourse about the human condition is eventually raised in a later dialogue (1235–1253). Terence, who parodies tragedy less frequently than Plautus, in a moment of extremely dark humor in Eunuch powerfully has Chaerea, in his detailed description of his rape of Pamphila, quote a Roman tragedian’s line about the omnipotence of Jupiter (the arch-sexual predator)— “He whose thunder rattles the lofty foundation of the sky” (590)—which clearly had empowered him to carry out the rape. Fathers as Targets of Humor While Roman institutions (e.g., legal, military, religious, culinary) and their associated figures are sometimes targets for parody or satire in Roman comedy, the most pervasively mocked figure in the genre is the senex, who as the champion of conservative moral values is closely associated with the allpowerful paterfamilias of everyday Roman life. Roman tradition granted absolute power over legal offspring to the eldest living male, including the right to sentence them to death. The paterfamilias only relinquished this power over his descendants at death (or marriage in the case of females who transferred their fathers’ power to their husbands), until which time the descendants technically owned no property. The legal status of Roman children thus differed little from that of slaves. Not surprisingly, much of extant Roman comedy reflects the tensions that informed relationships between patriarchs and their children, especially their sons. A good portion of Roman comedy’s humor comes at the expense of the father of the family, as in the standard plot wherein a son seeks to fleece his father to finance his love affair. Three extant plays of Plautus (Comedy of Asses, Casina, and Merchant) in fact focus on sexual rivalries between fathers and sons (cf. also Two Bacchises, where the motif is less central, especially its epilogue: “And we certainly wouldn’t have performed this play, if we hadn’t previously / Seen fathers become their sons’ rivals at brothels,” 1209–1210). In these amorous contests, the senex, in accordance with a comic code that makes love the province of the young, is doomed to failure, and he is typically depicted as physically and morally repulsive in his quest. Lysidamus, who lusts after a 16-year-old household slave in Casina, is persistently portrayed as a goat-like figure, associated with foul smells and insatiable lust, and at play’s end is hilariously humiliated by his wife’s devising a transvestite play-within-the-play to sexually denigrate him. In Merchant, Demipho initially is presented as a stereotypically harsh father, raised on the farm and allegedly endowed with its idealized, old-fashioned values. But counter to both tradition and the conventional wisdom of comedy, Demipho celebrates his uncontrollable passion for his son’s girlfriend as age appropriate: “Once you’re an old man, that’s the time / For love and leisure, while you’re still capable” (552–553). He eventually is chastised by his son’s friend Eutychus: “The idea that a man your age / Would steal your lovesick young son’s girlfriend that he bought with his own money!” (972–973), and, in reference to his behavior, the elderly slave Syra delivers a monologue denouncing the double standard for males and females in Roman sexual mores (817–829). A metatheatrical resolution (“this play will be shorter,” 1006) saves Demipho the further shame of his wife’s censure, and the play closes with the proposal of a comic law banning old men from love affairs and requiring them to support their sons’ affairs with prostitutes (1016–1024). The senex Demaenetus in Comedy of Asses, by contrast, is a milder father than Demipho but still appears ridiculous from the instant he calmly decides to support his son’s financially debilitating affair with a prostitute instead of raging about it “as other [typically comic] fathers do” (50). The ridiculous Demaenetus eventually insists on “a meal and a night” (736) with his son’s lover, a tryst that demands the son’s complicity against his mother, who nonetheless learns of her husband’s plan and prevents its realization by leading him home (937), that is, in language that playfully reverses traditional gender roles in Roman marriage ritual. In Adelphoe, Terence presents less farcical, and more psychologically nuanced Roman fathers, of both the harsh (Demea) and mild (Micio) varieties, and the play offers its audience a richly dialectical examination of competing parental philosophies, but Adelphoe nonetheless participates in the interrogation of traditional paternal authority that is so characteristic of Roman comedy. David M. Christenson

ANCIENT GREEK COMEDY The first known comedies were performed at the Festival of Dionysus in Athens in 487–486 BCE, perhaps as a cultural celebration and self-affirmation after the Athenian victory over the Persians at Marathon in 490 BCE (the theatrical competitions at the festival had started with tragedy, probably in 501 BCE). Ancient Greek comedy is traditionally divided into three periods or styles; Old Comedy (487–486 to 404 BCE), Middle Comedy (403 BCE to ca. 321 BCE), and New Comedy (from 321 BCE, reaching its peak in the mid-3rd century BCE). Nine complete old comedies and two middle comedies by one playwright, Aristophanes, survive; and one complete new comedy, and substantial fragments of seven more, survive—all of them written by Menander. In addition, there are fragments of lost plays both by these two playwrights and by their predecessors and contemporaries. Comedy at the Festivals of Dionysus Comedies were performed at Athens at two festivals of the god Dionysus: the winter festival of the Lenaea (January) and the Great Dionysia held at the start of the sailing season in March, which attracted visitors from elsewhere in the Greek world. Dionysus was the god of ekstasis—literally, “standing outside yourself”—an elevated state which could be attained by ritual, by the consumption of alcohol, and most importantly by either taking part in, or spectating at, an intense theatrical performance. His festivals also affirmed the ideology of the democracy through commemorations and displays before the plays began, which were designed to enhance civic pride and celebrate the city’s achievements. At the festivals during the period of free democracy when old comedies were being written and performed, there was freedom of speech for both comic and tragic dramatists—though one of Aristophanes’s principal targets, the leading politician Cleon, attempted without success to prosecute Aristophanes in the courts for the satire and abuse heaped on him in Acharnians (425 BCE) and especially Knights (424 BCE). This was because the festival performances were held in a theater over a kilometer away from the centers of Athenian political and legal life and during a public holiday. These two factors enabled the playwrights to see the burning issues of Athenian life from a distance, literally and metaphorically detached from the cutand-thrust of daily politics and judicial proceedings in the Assembly and the law courts. Aristophanes tells us in Frogs that he sees it not merely as the right, but as the duty of tragic and comic poets, to “teach what’s right” (Trans. 2010, 205); and if his surviving output is characteristic, Old Comedy was a remarkable blend of a wide range of types of Thalia, one of the nine Greek muses, in an image from the 2nd century CE. She presided over comedy and idyllic poetry. Source: National Archaeological Museum of Tarragona in Spain; Wikimedia Commons. 32 Ancient Greek Comedy humor with outspoken comment on serious political and social issues. Performance Conditions Like tragedies, comedies were presented by a number of playwrights (this number varied between three and five), competing for a prize. The actors performed in a rectangular orchēstra around 20 meters in length on each side; on three of these sides, it was surrounded by spectators whose seats rose steeply up the hillside in a natural amphitheater. On the fourth, the back side of the orchēstra was a long, low building called the skēnē, with a pair of doors opening onto the back of the playing space, and several windows. (By the time of New Comedy there were three doors or sets of doors in the front of the skēnē). The actors used this building to change masks and costumes, since between three and five actors played all the speaking roles—apart from the chorus. There were also “dumb masks”—silent extras. The chorus of 24 played a collective character, often in comedy a fantastic one—for example wasps in Aristophanes’s play of that name (422 BCE), who symbolized vividly by their yellow- and blackstriped costumes and their stings, the Athenian jurors’ love of a guilty verdict; or birds, in the fantasy play set in Cloudcuckooland (414 BCE), the kingdom of the birds. In Birds, the dialogue makes plain that Aristophanes’s sponsor spared no expense on elaborate costumes, as each of the 24 chorus members plays a different identifiable bird. By the time of the New Comedy, the chorus had declined in importance; in Old Comedy, their reactions in each scene and the sharp political and social commentary in their parabasis (the audience address often placed at the midpoint) were a very important part of the plays. But in Menander, whose New Comedy wholly lacks the barbed sociopolitical commentary of Aristophanes, the chorus does not play a specific character in dialogue with the solo actors; and the choral odes of Old Comedy, which were specifically written for each scene of each individual play, have been replaced simply by moments where a “choral interlude” is specified without being written out. Presumably, the director chose an appropriate song for each interlude, which might even have been originally used previously in another play. All of the actors were male; they wore padded costumes and full head-covering “faces” (the Greek word prosōpon does not imply concealment, as does the modern word mask), about two to two-and-a-half times life size. The origins of the mask are much disputed; what is not in dispute is that when plays were performed before up to 17,000 people in the Theatre of Dionysus, these larger-than-life sized “faces” were essential to convey basic information about the gender and age of each character to audience members who might be seated up to 100 meters away from the action. In Old Comedy, there were also portrait masks, representing (with appropriate caricature) named individuals who were being satirized in person in the plays. By the time of the New Comedy, a wider variety of masks had been developed to represent stock characters, such as the ardent young lover, the cunning slave, the grumpy old man, and the beautiful young woman who was often the object of the young lover’s thwarted but eventually triumphant affections. In Old Comedy, actors playing the parts of males wore a short chitōn, a costume extending only to midthigh; under it they wore a large artificial leather penis or phallus, in keeping with the humor of these plays, which is often bawdy and occasionally quite obscene. It would appear that at some time during the evolution toward the more gentle style of New Comedy, which is wholly without obscenity, the phallus disappeared from use. Old Comedy Old Comedies were based either on contemporary settings with bizarre twists or on send-ups of mythological situations. Though the extant titles and fragments suggest that the second of these types was quite common, it happens that the nine surviving Old Comedies by Aristophanes all conform to the first model. In each of them, the playwright invents a fantasy-idea, which though unattainable in real life is treated in the comedy as if it were perfectly achievable, and the hero or heroine sets out on a quest to achieve it. From the first play to the last, Aristophanes’s surviving plays thrive on the excellence of these fantasy-ideas, which provide not so much a coherent plot in any normal sense of that word as a set of pegs on which humorous episodes may be hung. For example in Acharnians the hero, fed up with the belligerence and corruption of the leading Athenians, decides to make a private peace with Sparta, and in the second half of the play he fends off assorted freeloaders who attempt to profit from his peace; his happiness is contrasted Ancient Greek Comedy 33 with the misery of the Athenian general Lamachos. In Peace the hero, Trygaios, flies up to heaven on a giant dung beetle (mounted on the crane which was by then part of the stage machinery) to confront Zeus and excavate the goddess Peace from the cave in which War has buried her. He returns to earth with two charming girls, Harvest and Festival; he marries the first and gives the second to the Council of Athens. In the justly famous Lysistrata (411 BCE), the heroine persuades the other wives of Athens, and representatives from the enemy states of Sparta, Boeotia, and Corinth, to abstain from sex until their husbands make peace. In the second half of the play, as the sex strike starts to make an impact, Aristophanes has great fun with assorted frustrated males entering with giant erect phalluses protruding under their chitōns; not surprisingly, Lysistrata is then able to enforce peace between the warring states, and the play concludes with a kōmos or scene of revelry; the men receive their wives back and they dance together to a Spartan song, symbolizing a reconciliation after 20 years of almost continuous warfare (everyone in the audience knew too well that this reconciliation was unlikely in real life). In the last surviving Old Comedy, Frogs (405 BCE), Dionysus himself, shortly after the deaths of Sophocles and Euripides, despairs of the quality of the poets who are still alive and presenting tragedies at his festival; he embarks on a quest down to Hades to bring back Euripides. Much of the humor of the first half of this play—the journey to Hades—depends on the comic interaction between Dionysus, who is here presented not as the aweinspiring power he is in tragedy, but as a fat, cowardly, lecherous, and none-too-intelligent buffoon, and his witty and ingenious slave Xanthias; the two alternate between “straight man” and “gag man” effortlessly. (Aristophanes must have had a great comic duo of actors at his disposal that year.) In the second half, there is a contest between Aeschylus, the long-dead grand old man of tragedy who is made to symbolize the upright, courageous Athens of the wars against Persia early in the 5th century BCE, and Euripides, who is made responsible for the moral decay that Aristophanes diagnoses in contemporary Athens. Euripides loses and Aeschylus goes back with Dionysus to save the city. The play includes a remarkable parabasis, a powerful plea for reconciliation between the bitterly divided factions at Athens, and indeed it not only won the first prize but was also revived the year after its first performance (an unparalleled honor for a comedy) because its message was so topical and pertinent. One month after the revival, Athens was conquered by Sparta, and the vigorous, independent, and highly participatory democracy that had nurtured this remarkable art form was brought to an end. Middle Comedy Our only two surviving examples of this style are by Aristophanes. In Assemblywomen (392 BCE) and Wealth (388 BCE), it is as if much of the life has been taken out of Aristophanes’s writing, as well as out of the democracy, with the defeat of Athens in 404 BCE. Assemblywomen involves an infiltration of the Assembly by women disguised as men, who get the Athenians to hand power over to them. They then establish a communist state in which everything is shared equally among all; in one of the best scenes, a young man is forced to sleep with three ugly old hags before he is allowed to make love to the girl of his dreams. But elsewhere, the fantasy-idea is pursued with much less vividness and effectiveness than in the play with which Assemblywomen must inevitably be compared, Lysistrata. Wealth is a gentle satire of human greed; the god Wealth receives his sight back and distributes wealth only to good people, instead of to scoundrels as he had done when he was blind. In both plays, the sharp social and political commentary of Aristophanes’s wartime Old Comedies has disappeared; there are no real-life Athenians in the cast of characters, though Assemblywomen has frequent humorous references to actual citizens—members of Aristophanes’s audience. The importance of the chorus has also been diminished; there is no parabasis in either play, and in several places where there should be a purposewritten choral song, there is simply a mark “song by the chorus.” Middle Comedy is the beginning of a transition toward New Comedy. Puns, bawdy, lazzi, and the other comic devices that are characteristic of Old Comedy are already less prominent in Aristophanes’s two surviving late works than in Old Comedy; in the New Comedy, they were to disappear altogether. It would appear from the fragments that some political comedy was still practiced, for example by Eubulus and Mnesimachus; and that many plays were either burlesques of a myth or parodies of a tragedian’s version of a myth. But the gentle mocking of contemporary manners in 34 Ancient Greek Comedy ordinary daily-life situations, which became dominant in New Comedy, also emerged in the Middle Comedy period. New Comedy In New Comedy, the chorus no longer plays any part in the action; it simply supplies choral interludes between the five acts. Realistic, often complex plots, realistic (though stereotyped) characters, and gently humorous situations replace the predominant, grand fantasy-idea, outrageously larger-than-life characters and robust humor of Old Comedy. Because of the conquest of Greece by the Macedonians, and the imposition of rulers chosen by them, there was now almost no political comedy. Only one author of New Comedy survives, Menander—and only in papyrus fragments. But the Roman plays of Plautus and Terence take themes, and often whole plots, from New Comedy; and the one play by Menander which survives complete (The Bad-Tempered Man), and the substantial fragments of seven others, confirm the impression that we gain from the Latin adaptations. The other two leading practitioners were Diphilus and Philemon—who was actually more successful in competition than his contemporary Menander—who was not recognized as the leading New Comedy playwright until after his death. Both survive only in short fragments. New Comedy laid the foundations for the mainstream of comedy, both in ancient Rome and subsequently in the whole of Europe from the Renaissance to the present day. For example, Shakespeare’s early comedies are much indebted to Plautus and Terence, and therefore through them to New Comedy; Molière’s comedies would have been very different without his use of devices from New Comedy; and Oscar Wilde exploits the conventions and themes of New Comedy to brilliant effect. The characters in New Comedy are realistic, fictional individuals—ordinary Athenians—caught up in complex circumstances, frequently generated by rape, seduction, or the separation of infants from their parents. The complex plots often create scenes involving mistaken identity or ironic situations in which a character onstage knows less than the audience, and misunderstandings—sometimes severe— develop between characters. It is no surprise that the goddesses Misapprehension and Chance speak the prologues of Menander’s The Shorn Girl and The Shield; they may be said to preside over the course of the plots of the surviving plays. Scenes are often generated by social tensions— especially between rich and poor, fathers and sons, townsmen and country folk, and free men and women and slaves; and heterosexual love, triumphing eventually over obstacles, frequently plays a prominent part. There were recurrent stock characters (including plotting slaves, vain and abusive cooks, and boastful parasites) and stock situations; Menander once ingeniously arranged, in The Shorn Girl, for the recognition of long-lost children to coincide with the removal of obstacles between lovers, so the play ends in celebration both of a recognition and of a forthcoming wedding. A similar dénouement is achieved in The Girl from Samos. Unlike Old Comedy, New Comedy only rarely referred to contemporary political issues, almost never made jokes that would only be appreciated by one Athenian audience in one particular year (there is however a reference to two audience members in The Girl from Samos), and never (as far as we know) introduced caricatures of real individuals from the audience. In consequence, it provided an attractive export industry; travelling companies toured New Comedy throughout the Greek-speaking world. And this kind of comedy possesses the lasting capacity to appeal to a wide audience, since it gently mocks universal features of human nature. As a result, New Comedies could be—and were—readily adapted for their own purposes by subsequent playwrights. The absence of slavery from the Elizabethan world, for example, gave Shakespeare no problem when he adapted The Comedy of Errors from Plautus’s The Brothers Menaechmus; that play was itself adapted from a lost New (or possibly Middle) Comedy that had originated the fundamental idea of mistaken identity between identical twins. Twins separated in infancy, this time of opposite sexes, are also central to Menander’s The Shorn Girl; and this second device was brilliantly reused (and parodied) by Joe Orton, over two millennia later, in What the Butler Saw (1969). Michael Ewans

Quisiera dormir, poder descansar entregarme a mis sueños,  y volar, sentir ese sentiimiento de  libertad para así poder alcanzarla felicidad olvidarme de todo lo ingrato en sueños tener otraoportunidad pero me doy cuentaque todo es inútilla lucha constante,día a día, es estérilpero tengo mis mundos alternos , queme alimentan,me nutren y en descanso mi  alma en  añico y como un rompecabezas uno las piezasy existo d nuevo, con mis letras amadas que son mi mundo, mi Universo,Mis muñecas de papel  crepé  mis rostros de muñecas y mujeres me siento poco a poco ompleta

Quiero decir algo, lo que escribo aca, son instantes de mi.Estoy encontrandome realizando muchas cosas que antes habia creado en mi mente. Una vez mas, vuelvo a proyectar y traer aqui y ahora lo que deseo. Gracias grcias gracias, son entre otras, mis palabras *Gatillos*. Soy una version de mi elevada. Veo claridad, veo bienestar, abundancia,paz, amor, resiliencia, dolor, cambios,pensamientos, sensaciones, comienzos y fin. Siento que voy decretando, atrayendo, manipulando a mi tiempo, tejiendo todo lo que deseo abarcar. Siento que soy un iman, realmente puedo decir que soy un iman de todo lo que quiero que me suceda, o al menos, la gran mayoria. Vamos siendo, nos vamos transformando, cambiando la piel, con visiones todo el tiempo diferentes. Mujer, hecha de lo transcurrido. gracias por cuidarme, amarme,sanarme cuando nadie mas estaba alli, por abrirme las puertas de tu alma y conocer tu fuente interna, tu profundidad,tu ser pleno y tus refugios. Digna de admirar-me.

                   Entre lo que veo y siento,                   se pasea la indignación que callo.                   No lleno el pergamino de sílabas amargas ,                   ni realizo aspavientos como molinos locos.                   Soy grato, agradecido, y la verdad es mi sangre.                   Si veo a la injusticia levantarse como espada ardua difícilmente me contengo.                   Soy como de otra sustancia aún no corroída.                   Tengo raíz y fruto de conciencia muy firme.                   No tomo del cáliz de maldad que degusta el monarca                    y detesto el cohecho al que alaban los jueces.                    Ser de Principios ?......Más bien caldo de sentimientos.                    De la lisonja huyo y el regalo extranjero.                    Muy pocos somos los que damos de lo escasísimo de que somos partícipes,                    más, mientras alguno quede en pie, veremos por las causas.                                         

.                               Ante el mar                               y su volúmen húmedo.                               Inhalo de su sal:                               No soy exhalación como Octavio Paz dijera.                               Tan sólo soy suspiro traspasado.                               Por vapores, presencia y refulgencia.                               Agua omnipotente a donde los ríos caen.                               Soy vapor, soy éter, soy lo que se vacía,                               ante la inmensidad sé lo que es exhuberancia.                               Ante tanta sustancia inmensa me reflejo en idea.                               La voluntad del mar y sus rostros de óceano,                               me hacen ver que no paso de ser centelleo o detalle pasajero.                                

El sabor de sus labios El sabor de desengaño     Sus ojos Se extraviaron Al vacío cayeron intactos     Olvidé el color de su voz Se disfrazó de silencio inhumano  Todo Absolutamente todo Lo voy olvidando.    

Te desenvuelves Por mis laberintos Como si conocieras el camino  paisajes infinitos  No hay fin En este camino No hay retorno del olvido  Sino olvido no vivo Y ese es mi único camino Para sacarte de mi laberinto.           

                    Para qué la palabra si basta con lo sombrío de tu mirada ?                    Sobran los párpados ante esta expresión rígida de la tristeza.                    No intentes gesticular el rictus entrampado en el labio:                    Con el silencio tengo para ver tu marcha asentada en tus pupilas.                    Como tarde de Jueves Santo y de muerte de poeta llueves y no es París.                    Me enseñaron que el alma se hizo para llevar dolor y templarse en desgracias.                    No musites frases que abyecten a la consolación, no hables nada con denuedo.                    Arrojado en mis mismos brazos soportaré, quizá ebrio, tu no presencia.                    Recibe por adelantado mi adiós pues ya tus iris me adelantaron el tuyo.