ABSTRACT
The comic genre is universal for the Classical world1. It includes the majority of poetic forms and belletristic prose. Comedy itself became a genre relatively late, but it itself as a genre was dependent on the understanding of “comic” that was broader and less restricted than the drama of laughter. But even in the narrow sense ancient comedy is universal for the Classical period. It is interpenetrated by lyric and philosophy (cosmology) and contains three different types of comedy: Old, Middle, and New in Greece, and modifications of these comedies in Rome. No other Classical genre has so many varieties.
