A Phlyax play also known as a hilarotragedy, was a burlesque

Burlesque

Burlesque is a literary, dramatic or musical work intended to cause laughter by caricaturing the manner or spirit of serious works, or by ludicrous treatment of their subjects...

 dramatic form that developed in the Greek colonies of Magna Graecia

Magna Graecia

Magna Græcia is the name of the coastal areas of Southern Italy on the Tarentine Gulf that were extensively colonized by Greek settlers; particularly the Achaean colonies of Tarentum, Crotone, and Sybaris, but also, more loosely, the cities of Cumae and Neapolis to the north...

 in the 4th century BCE. Its name derives from the Phlyakes or “Gossip Players” in Doric Greek

Doric Greek

Doric or Dorian was a dialect of ancient Greek. Its variants were spoken in the southern and eastern Peloponnese, Crete, Rhodes, some islands in the southern Aegean Sea, some cities on the coasts of Asia Minor, Southern Italy, Sicily, Epirus and Macedon. Together with Northwest Greek, it forms the...

. From the surviving titles of the plays they appear to have been a form of mythological

Greek mythology

Greek mythology is the body of myths and legends belonging to the ancient Greeks, concerning their gods and heroes, the nature of the world, and the origins and significance of their own cult and ritual practices. They were a part of religion in ancient Greece...

 burlesque, which mixed figures from the Greek pantheon with the stock characters and situations of Attic New Comedy

Ancient Greek comedy

Ancient Greek comedy was one of the final three principal dramatic forms in the theatre of classical Greece . Athenian comedy is conventionally divided into three periods, Old Comedy, Middle Comedy, and New Comedy...

.

Only five authors of the genre are known by name: Rhinthon

Rhinthon

Rhinthon was a Hellenistic dramatist.The son of a potter, he was probably a native of Syracuse and afterwards settled at Tarentum....

 and Sciras of Taranto, Blaesus of Capri, Sopater of Paphos and Heraklides. The plays themselves survive only as titles and a few fragments.A substantial body of South Italian vases are thought to represent scenes of the phlyakes, giving rise to much speculation on Greek stagecraft and dramatic form.

Characteristics of the genre

Nossis

Nossis

Nossis was an ancient Greek woman epigrammist and poet, c. 300 BCE, who lived in Locri. Her epigrams were inspired by Sappho.Twelve epigrams of hers survive in the Greek Anthology....

 of Locri provides the closest contemporary explanation of the genre in her epitaph

Epitaph

An epitaph is a short text honoring a deceased person, strictly speaking that is inscribed on their tombstone or plaque, but also used figuratively. Some are specified by the dead person beforehand, others chosen by those responsible for the burial...

 for Rhinthon:

Pass by with a loud laugh and a kindly word
For me: Rhinthon of Syracuse am I,
The Muses’ little nightingale; and yet
For tragic farce I plucked an ivy wreath.

Textual and archaeological evidence give a partial picture of these burlesques of mythology and daily life. The absence of any surviving script has led to conjecture that they were largely improvised

Improvisation

Improvisation is the practice of acting, singing, talking and reacting, of making and creating, in the moment and in response to the stimulus of one's immediate environment and inner feelings. This can result in the invention of new thought patterns, new practices, new structures or symbols, and/or...

. The vase paintings indicate that they were performed on a raised wooden stage with an upper gallery, and that the actors wore grotesque costumes and masks similar to those of Attic Old Comedy. Acrobatics and farcical scenes were major features of the phlyax.

The phlyakes seems to die out by the late 3rd century, but the Oscan inhabitants of Campania

Campania

Campania is a region in southern Italy. The region has a population of around 5.8 million people, making it the second-most-populous region of Italy; its total area of 13,590 km² makes it the most densely populated region in the country...

 subsequently developed a tradition of farces, parodies, and satires influenced by late Greek models, which became popular in Rome during the 3rd century BC. This genre was known as Atellan farce, Atella

Atella

Atella was an ancient city of Campania, halfway between Naples and Capua; its ruins lie between the towns of Orta di Atella and Sant'Arpino. Atella is not mentioned until the Second Punic War, when, although an independent city striking its own coinage, it was allied with Capua and the other...

 being the name of a Campanian town. Atellan farce introduced a set of stock character

Stock character

A Stock character is a fictional character based on a common literary or social stereotype. Stock characters rely heavily on cultural types or names for their personality, manner of speech, and other characteristics. In their most general form, stock characters are related to literary archetypes,...

s such as Maccus and Bucco to Latin comedy; even in antiquity, these were thought to be the ancestors of the characters found in Plautus

Plautus

Titus Maccius Plautus , commonly known as "Plautus", was a Roman playwright of the Old Latin period. His comedies are the earliest surviving intact works in Latin literature. He wrote Palliata comoedia, the genre devised by the innovator of Latin literature, Livius Andronicus...

, and perhaps distantly of those of commedia dell'arte

Commedia dell'arte

Commedia dell'arte is a form of theatre characterized by masked "types" which began in Italy in the 16th century, and was responsible for the advent of the actress and improvised performances based on sketches or scenarios. The closest translation of the name is "comedy of craft"; it is shortened...

. Although an older view held that Attic comedy was the only source of Roman comedy, it has been argued that Rhinthon in particular influenced Plautus’s Amphitruo.

The vase paintings

The so-called Phlyax vases are a principal source of information on the genre. By 1967, 185 of these vases had been identified. Since depictions of theatre and especially comedy are rare in fabrics other than the South Italian, these have been thought to portray the distinctly local theatre tradition. The vases first appeared at the end of the 5th century BCE, but most are 4th century. They represent grotesque characters, the masks of comedy, and the props of comic performance such as ladders, baskets, and open windows. About a quarter of them depict a low wooden temporary stage, but whether this was used in reality is a point of contention.

Some scholars view the vases as depicting Attic Old Comedy. The Wurzburg Telephus Travestitus vase (bell krater, H5697) was identified in 1980 as a phlyax vase, but Csapo and Taplin independently have suggested it instead represents the Thesmophoriazousai of Aristophanes

Aristophanes

Aristophanes , son of Philippus, of the deme Cydathenaus, was a comic playwright of ancient Athens. Eleven of his forty plays survive virtually complete...

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