Ephippus is an outstanding playwright of Greek Middle Comedy. He won a single Lenaean victory ca. 378-376 BC and continued being productive until the late 340s. His twenty-eight surviving fragments reveal a wide thematic range: myth burlesque (with a special fondness for Heracles), political allegory, sympotic themes, personal mockery, satire of philosophy (Plato), hetairai. His corpus features seven hapax terms, as well as the highest percentage of anapaestic dimeter lines of all poets of Middle Comedy.



Athina Papachrysostomou is Associate Professor of Ancient Greek Literature at the University of Patras, Greece. She specializes in Greek comedy. Beyond Greek comedy, her research interests extend to Athenian democracy, Thucydides and Greek political thought, Greek tragedy and textual criticism.