While mutual influences between tragedy and comedy are generally acknowledged, satyr drama usually lacks a place in this system of relationships: according to Demetr. Eloc. 169 it was equivalent to a τραγῳδία παίζουσα, and modern scholars usually consider it a sub-genre of tragedy. This, as S. shows in Chapter 1, goes back to the binary opposition between serious and low poetry found in Aristotle's Poetics, that bypasses satyr play (although not avoiding inconsistency when he speaks of a ‘satyric’ phase of early tragedy). But satyr play was an independent genre, and shared several features with comedy: both derive from the Dionysiac kômos in its local variants (Corinthian padded dancers, dithyrambs performed by satyr choruses, etc.), use a ridiculous language with frequent sexual allusions and are intended to raise laughter.

The purpose of S.'s book is to investigate these relationships (mostly neglected by scholars) along the whole life of the satyric genre, from the beginnings to the postclassical era. In Chapter 2, while discussing the prehistory of both genres, he assumes that satyrs at a certain time inherited the role and features of padded dancers, which afterwards transmitted to comedy: Pratinas' ‘hyporcheme’ (TrGF 4 F 3), combining dithyrambic, satyric and comic elements, provides a good example of these early and still undifferentiated performances.

In Chapter 3 S. analyses similarities between Attic satyr play and Epicharmus' Doric farce (mythological burlesque, mild humour without aggressive attack on contemporary figures, sexual innuendo and so on), and suggests that it was satyr play that passed these features on from Sicily to Middle Comedy. If this is an attractive hypothesis, the relationship between Epicharmus and Aeschylus, despite our fragmentary evidence, is hard to deny: Aeschylus travelled to Sicily in the time of Hieron, when Epicharmus was active (perhaps they met there), and titles show that each knew the other's work (compare Aeschylus' Theoroi, Diktyoulkoi, Persae with Epicharmus' Thearoi, Diktyes, Persae). Moreover, S. collects evidence to argue that Epicharmus may have used a satyr chorus in some dramas.

But the kinship of satyrs and comedy became more evident in the 30s of the fifth century (Chapter 4): when Morychides' decree forbade personal onstage attacks (μὴ κωμῳδεῖν), Euripides, taking κωμῳδεῖν in the literal sense of ‘singing a kômos-song’, produced Alcestis, a ‘prosatyric’ piece without satyrs, that is to say ‘without kômos’. This, according to S., was probably an ironical response to the decree and was intended to show its absurdity by displaying the paradoxical consequences of a literal interpretation: but it would have been hardly conceivable without the equivalence kômos–satyroi. In the same period we can see a sudden proliferation of comedies by Callias, Ecphantides and others, whose titles refer to satyrs, or where a satyr chorus is explicitly attested (Cratinus' Dionysalexandros).

A typical element of Middle Comedy is the reduction of gods and heroes to a ‘domestic’ level, so that they are wrapped into a scenic context made by everyday objects and situations: Chapter 5 traces this topos back to fifth-century satyr drama. S. also seeks for evidence that ancient criticism was already aware of the relationship between the two genres: the late grammarian Euanthius (fourth century c.e.) seems to consider ‘satyra’ equivalent to Middle Comedy, since he places it in chronological order between Old and New Comedy.

Chapter 6 illustrates the influence of comedy on postclassical satyr play, a phenomenon (unlike the previous ones) well acknowledged by scholars for a long time. Astydamas' Heracles, Python's Agen, Lycophron's Menedemus and the anonymous anapaests of TrGF F 646a (which some scholars assign to comedy) clearly display how the genre incorporated the same features that comedy had gradually lost: contemporary satire (sometimes for political purposes, as in Python's Agen), literary debate, metrical licence, parabasis-like structures and language. Among the possible causes of this contamination, S. invokes not only the peripheral origin of poets like Python and Lycophron or the typically Hellenistic tendency to experimentation and Kreuzung der Gattungen, but also the reorganisation of the Great Dionysia in the mid-fourth century: since satyr play was now performed out of the competition (a single play each year), poets probably felt freer to introduce radical innovations, knowing that their plays would no longer be subject to comparison. On the other side, Middle Comedy had adopted many features of classical satyr play, so that the latter became in a certain sense a redundant duplicate of the former. However, the epigraphical records show that the genre was still practised in the late Hellenistic and Roman era: this accounts for Horace's excursus in Ars Poetica (vv. 220–50), ‘the fullest extant treatment of satyr drama from the ancient world’ (p. 150), discussed by S. in the conclusion.

The work casts new light on the extant evidence, combining already known data into an original synthesis and presenting them from an intriguing perspective. Of course, the fragmentary state of our knowledge requires caution, and in the introduction (p. 7) S. prudently declares that ‘the evolution and interplay of Greek comedy and satyr drama reconstructed in the following chapters must remain speculative’. This is particularly true of the late Archaic and early Classical age: Pratinas' fragment is not necessarily satyric, and S. seems to underestimate (like most scholars) ancient testimonia that link this poet to choral lyric (see especially TrGF 4 T 4 and F 7–9). This exposes him to the risk of falling into a circular argument, when he quotes Pratinas' fr. 6 to show that ‘discussion on performance may have been ever more prominent in the late sixth- and early fifth-century satyr drama’, at the same time arguing that ‘these verses, since they were written by Pratinas, presumably were excerpted from a tragedy or satyr play’ (p. 52): in fact they have nothing satyric, and their technicality and critical skill makes them quite different from references to music found in satyr play. Were they anonymous, nobody would question their belonging to choral lyric, nor think of assigning them to a satyr play.

S.'s statements and hypotheses are in general well supported by literary and archaeological evidence (the book includes 31 figures, almost all taken from vases); only in a few cases do they seem to go a little beyond what can be reasonably inferred from the texts. So, for example, the attempt to discover as many sexual allusions as possible in the language of satyrs may occasionally result in over-interpretation, as in Soph. fr. 171.1 Radt (from Dionysiskos): here S. (p. 74), following Henderson, takes βρῶσις (‘meat’, according to him) as a possible reference to φαλλός, because its synonymous κρέας can have this sexual ambivalence. But βρῶσις in Sophocles refers to food for the baby Dionysus, not to meat: a double semantic shift βρῶσις–κρέας–φαλλός here seems unlikely, unless we assume that a baby not yet able to eat by himself can be fed with a pork chop or roast-beef.Footnote ¹ Similarly, when S. points out (pp. 117ff.) that Aristotle's characterisation of the ‘satyric’ element of early tragedy (Poet. 1449a 19–20) as λέξις γελοία resembles his description of the indirect humour of ‘recent’ (i.e. Middle) Comedy (EN 1128a 22–3), this does not mean that he was thinking of some connection between them.

These critical remarks, however, do not undermine the overall value of the book, which is carefully written (except for occasional misprints: p. 70 κλήσεις for κηλήσεις, p. 84 κιθαραῳδικῶν for κιθαρῳδικῶν, p. 88 διαδροτεῖν for διακροτεῖν, p. 93 αἲθωνι for αἴθωνι, and p. 136 n. 47 ‘Cippola’ for ‘Cipolla’) and well argued. Scholars will probably continue to call satyr play ‘a playful tragedy’ (and I think that they will not be entirely wrong: after all, satyr plays were written by tragedians); but this book convincingly reminds us that no firm boundary can be traced between it and comedy.