Bibliographic record
Abstract
The reader may reasonably enquire, ‘Why (yet) another book on Old Comedy?’ I sympathise. We have for some time been pretty well equipped with texts and commentaries and scholars have recently raced to pack the bookshelves with volumes devoted to the interpretation of Aristophanes, of Eupolis and of the genre as a whole. Yet I have felt obliged to add to this stockpile because I think that still we have not reached any real understanding of several crucial matters which relate to the context and impact of satirical comedy in the fifth century, and that I have discovered a new way to resolve them. In the welter of severe ignorance which pervades the study even of Aristophanes, to say nothing of his fragmentary rivals, this may seem like a bold claim. Nonetheless, since what I have to say arises in the first instance from an authorial address (the revised parabasis of Clouds ) and then from external evidence, I feel that it is worth proceeding, even if the journey ahead is parlous and fraught with lacunae. I begin by challenging the general assumption (for which see among others Ste Croix, Sommerstein, Henderson and Edwards) that insofar as we can know where Aristophanes stood politically, it was on the ‘right’ of Athenian politics. A new interpretation of the context envisaged for the Clouds revision, together with a reexamination of some external evidence, points in a very different direction, towards an Aristophanes whose ideological anchor is at the radical end of the democratic spectrum.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.459 | 0.265 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".