Abstract

The two slaves, Xanthias and Sosias, posted by their master's son to guard his ‘sick’ father Philocleon, challenge the audience to guess the nature of the mysterious and strange disease &nuó&sgr&ogr&nu &lambda&lambdaó&kappa&ogr&tau&ogr&nu, 71) on account of which the father must be kept inside the house. When the correct answer to the riddle is finally disclosed, Philocleon is revealed to beis revealed to be φιληλιαστσ , namely a man ‘who loves to be a juror’ and to spend his days in the law-courts passionately pursuing the infatuation of which his son tries to cure him by locking him up away from the law-courts and from his fellow jurors. The joke owes its comic effect to incongruity, termed the ‘humour of inappropriateness’ by MacDowell, who writes: ‘It is funny when addiction to being a juror is called a disease , because “disease” is a word which is not generally applied to such conditions’. It should, however, be stressed that in order to create this sense of incongruity the previously mentioned diseases must form a class with certain common characteristics fundamentally different from those of Philocleon's, thus gradually moulding the audience's expectations and channelling them in a completely different direction