Aristophanes and Plutarch: Comedy Laughing at herself

By analyzing Plutarch's criticism to Aristophanes' comic production as paradigm for the Menander's work, one realizes that the author seems to lay the foundation for a study about the differences between the Old and New Comedy periods, although he originally wanted to establish a judgment value between Plutarch and Aristophanes. The findings of Plutarch, although obtained from a perspective which is both specific (limited by only two poets) and diachronic (since both comedy writers, although representatives of the Greek comic genre, belong to different historical contexts) offers an excellent opportunity to confront both periods of Greek comedy and to verify their reception by the Roman audience at the time of Augustus. It is an important paradigm of poetic genre, such a text, a performance and the audience. I intend to find a relationship between Aristophanes' criticism to Old-Comedy and Plutarch's criticism to Old-Comedy from Aristophanes. This study will establish the points where there is an identity or diversity in the proposed paradigms. I expect to assess how Plutarch's judgments agree or disagree with Aristophanes, and the Roman reaction.