Il ritratto di Pericle nella commedia attica antica. Presenze e assenze dei comici nella biografia periclea di Plutarco.

That Pericles has been a privileged target of the political Athenian comedy in the second half of the fifth century BC is very well proved by the rich collection of historical and erudite evidences which more or less allude to how the citizens’ dissent was spread on the comic scene not only distinctly by Aristophanes but also by Callias, Cratinus, Hermippus, Plato Comicus, Teleclides and other well-known of archaia authors. The most important source of these comic evidences is the plutarchean Life of Pericles. Our purpose is then to reconstruct the portrait of the great Athenian statesman as it was shaped in such adverse tradition. From the comic repertoire available in the periclean Plutarch’s biography is unfortunately absent the Cratinus’ Dionysalexander, whose mention by the Chaeronean erudite would have allowed to much more precisely contextualise this significant evidence of the comic anti-periclean tradition.