Il peso della parola: ῥῆμα ed ἔπος nella commedia antica

In Greek comedy, words always carry particular weight, which Aristophanes and his colleagues never failed to emphasise. In their extremely creative language, the depiction of speech often presented listeners seated in the auditorium of the Theatre of Dionysus with a series of concrete images that gave their ›winged words‹ a very physical reality. This contribution is a brief journey into the ›weight of words‹ in ancient comedy, through the analysis of a number of passages in which the ῥήματα and ἔπη of the protagonists (especially the tragic poets Aeschylus and Euripides, but also the sophists and politicians) are repeatedly laden with adjectives and epithets that underline their dimensions – large and small, thick and thin, high and low – to emphasise how, in 5th-century BC Athens, the use of words played a fundamental role.