Apologies in Greek and Latin Comedy: Rare but Fair?

This study investigates the act of apologizing in Greek and Latin comedy, a speech act that, while relatively rare in classical texts, provides insight into notions of forgiveness in Antiquity. Despite apology and forgiveness not being central to the classical worldview, instances in Greek and Latin comedy demonstrate that some form of remedial action was taken after a wrongdoing. Employing a qualitative and quantitative contrastive socio-pragmatic approach, the study first examines the semantic-conceptual core of forgiveness in the two languages. It then analyzes the pragma-linguistic strategies used to perform apologies, identifying the most frequent patterns. The analysis highlights contextual differences between authors, offering insight into variation in apologetic practices and associated concepts of face. Finally, the study considers socio-pragmatic variables and tentatively discusses the hypothesis that societal differences may underlie the observed divergences in the realization of apologies across Greek and Latin.