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he could much more conveniently indulge his favourite pastime if they were to set up a courtroom in their own home. The first `prisoner' brought for judgement is a dog accused of stealing a leg of meat from the kitchen. Anticleon contrives so to confuse his father with his conduct of the case that Procleon inadvertently places his juryman's pebble in the wrong pot, thus for the first time in his life finding a prisoner not guilty. Initially he is furious at having been tricked into betraying his most deeplycherished principle, but gradually he comes to recognise that his obsession with sitting in judgement was only a terrible imprisonment from which he has now been released. The conclusion of the play shows him happily discovering his new `liberated' self, singing, drinking, going off to parties, pouring scorn on his old jury colleagues who are still stuck on the treadmill of their obsession, and in a final tour de force showing he can dance everyone else off the stage.

In the Thesmophoriazusae (The Poet and the Women) the characters possessed by dark, life-denying ill-humour are the women of Athens who, as they gather for their yearly festival, the Thesmophoria, are plotting to kill the playwright Euripides for the unfair way, as they see it, in which he presents women in his plays. Euripides smuggles his uncle Mnesilochus into the gathering, disguised as a woman, to plead his case. Inevitably his disguise is penetrated, and Mnesilochus is held prisoner while the women angrily decide his fate. He manages to get word of what has happened out to Euripides, who makes various absurd attempts to rescue him, disguised as a succession of heroes from his plays. Only when in desperation Euripides finally plucks up the courage to appear before them in his own identity, and threatens to reveal to their husbands the way they have been carrying on while their menfolk were away at the war, does the light dawn. The women recognise their true behaviour has been such that there is no way they would wish it to be exposed. There is a general return to good humour. Mnesilochus is released and all ends happily.

In each of these stories the eventual happy outcome hinges on a crucial turning point: the moment when the `dark' characters, obsessed with their divisive desire to make war, to judge, to kill, are suddenly forced to recognise something so important about themselves that it completely changes their attitude, paving the way to reconciliation and celebration. It was this which Aristotle called anagnorisis or `recognition, the moment when something previously not recognised or known suddenly becomes clear. `Recognition, as Aristotle put it, `means the change from ignorance to knowledge'. Something is discovered which transforms the situation. And although comedy was to go through many changes in the centuries which lay ahead, this transition `from ignorance to knowledge' was to remain at the heart of the comic plot, as the central clue to what this type of story is about.

Stage two - The `New Comedy'

During the century after the heyday of Aristophanes, Comedy went through a change so marked as to amount almost to a mutation. As the `Old Comedy' gave way to the so-called `New Comedy, particularly associated with the Athenian Menander, and later with his Roman imitators Plautus and Terence, two new elements came to the fore in the plot, so fundamental they have come to be thought of as almost inseparable from Comedy ever since.

The most striking innovation was that Comedy became a love story. The action became centred for the first time on a hero and a heroine: and the chief effect of the confusion or conflict in the story is to keep the two apart until they can be brought triumphantly together in the closing scenes. In other words, the first thing we may observe about the `New Comedy' is simply that it has arrived at the universal happy ending we are already so familiar with from other kinds of story: the final uniting of a hero and a heroine, in a way which symbolises completion, the end of division and the renewal of life.

There