Exploring Ancient Greek Comedy: Material Engagement Theory and Computational Tools

Material objects are of outstanding importance for theater studies and the analysis of drama, the genre in which the imaginary world is performed and embodied on stage. Material Engagement Theory (the world of things, artifacts and material signs added to the cognitive equation) proves to be an insightful tool when applied to ancient Greek comedy, a genre which preserves a significant number of objects from antiquity. Material Engagement Theory is the theoretical basis of the database we have been building since 2019, namely the Lexicon of Objects from Greek Comedy (https://www.lggk.uni-freiburg.de/wordpressNew/), the first database collecting and visualizing mentions of artifacts from the entire field of ancient Greek comedy. This paper explains the principles of applied Material Engagement Theory (section 1) and gives examples of how objects in drama influence human perceptions (section 2). It then discusses the database and its functions (section 3), and finally presents the research results from the database with detailed explanations of several case studies (section 4). The examples in the last section show that both quantitative analysis and the computer-assisted processing of the dramatic corpus are necessary for contemporary research on ancient drama. They open up fresh avenues for interpretation and raise philological and scholarly work to a new level of research.