Aristophanes on how to write tragedy: what you wear is what you are

This article looks at those scenes in Old Comedy where we gain glimpses of tragic poets in the act of composition - namely, Euripides in Acharnians and Agathon in Thesmophoriazusae. With these scenes as a base, it looks at how tragic composition is represented in Old Comedy and attempts to place this in the wider context of contemporary beliefs about literary composition as a whole, discussing the extent to which Aristophanes' views were innovative or derivative. The final section considers what the foregoing discussion can teach us about Aristophanes' own compositional processes