ABSTRACT What can comic fragments teach us that our better-preserved plays cannot? In this chapter, I suggest that the same uncertainties that render fragmentary passages so difficult to understand and interpret are in fact the very features that render them uniquely valuable tools for challenging our assumptions about comic drama. When it comes to assessing the representation of minoritized and/or marginalized figures, fragmentary passages can help to suggest and develop paradigms and approaches that diverge, or break entirely, from mainstream scholarly consensus. But first it is necessary to recognize how certain cognitive biases produced by, inter alia, scholars’ deep familiarity with canonical texts and the habits of academic citation and amplification can artificially limit or distort our understanding of abstruse and often decontextualized passages transmitted in fragmentary form. In part 1 of this article, I detail some forms of cognitive bias that shape modern scholarly approaches to ancient texts in general, and which prove particularly tenacious in the face of fragmentary texts. In parts 2–5, I examine how the fragmentary comic corpus represents one traditionally marginalized figure, that of the female sex worker or hetaira, with a particular focus on the famed fourth-century Athenian hetaira Gnathaena. Through a series of deliberately non-traditional interpretations of the characterization of sex workers in a variety of comic fragments, I suggest that certain fragments can be interpreted as part of a positive representation of sex workers, both individually and collectively. This alternative perspective is but one example of how a conscious eschewing of established approaches and familiar patterns of ‘major’ works can open out new avenues of scholarly understanding, especially when it comes to fragmentary texts.
Anna Uhlig (Fri,) studied this question.