Bibliographic record
Abstract
Among the many paradoxes of Old Comedy, perhaps the most striking is that it combines acute social commentary and political interventions with the expression and realization of wishes of the most thoroughly impossible kind, in the creation of a transformed world or an alternative society. A golden age returns or is found elsewhere or integrated into Athenian society or politics; nostalgic visions of the recent past are (re-)constituted; a good life is sought with the birds or the fishes; protagonists seek equal distribution of wealth and absence of labour; women achieve power; there is an end to war. Such comic utopianism poses in a particularly sharp fashion the problem of the individual aims and actions of comic characters, the problem of the politics of individual authors or of the genre as a whole, and the problem of humour, as Athenian realia collide with culturally, historically or logically impossible worlds. \nSuch collisions of worlds afford the opportunity to explore both social/political critique and aspirations. They are a key source of humour and rarely systematic, but by playing with, representing and developing social, political and economic ideals, the transformations of comedy play a distinct role in the speculative thinking of the period. In being prepared to contemplate and explore, however humorously, notions such as economic equality, women as political agents, or, from a modern perspective, perhaps the most laughable of all, a world at peace, Old Comedy seems in its own way to have been at the forefront of public speculation, going beyond and perhaps even leading the radical edge of Greek ideas. Over the course of its development, however, Greek comedy proceeded to move decisively against these sorts of transformative plots and worlds. In place of flagrant impossibilities, novel social or political schemes and the enactment of change that an audience can choose to believe in, Middle and New Comedy ushered in a stable, apparently realistic world in which the comedy of manners and morals takes place. And yet, as I shall argue, this comic world of Menander, in its own way, is just as utopian as the self-consciously extravagant worlds of Aristophanes and his contemporaries.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.037 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.018 | 0.004 |
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".