Tragic Smiles: When Tragedy Gets Too Comic for Aristotle and Later Hellenistic Readers

The scholia to the tragedians inform us about the views some ancient critics held concerning the failure of tragic sublimity, i.e., the intrusion of "comic" or "excessively comic" features upon tragic action and heroes. Most of these remarks focus on Euripides, and they complain about his characters’ ethics and their actions. They possibly descend from the Aristotelian (and perhaps quite commonly held) idea that tragedy, unlike comedy, should not deal with baser characters. Yet hypotheseis ascribed to Aristophanes of Byzantium and a sub-series of scholia to Euripides, possibly derived from the same Aristophanes, prefer instead to focus on a specific structural feature, and point to the "excessively comic" (or "excessively satyric") character of those Euripidean tragedies that do not end in a catastrophe. This approach seems rather un-Aristotelian, and it might point to a uniquely ‘Hellenistic’ scholarly position acknowledging the points of contact between Euripides' tragedy and New Comedy.