Contents -- Abbreviations -- 1. Narratives of Resistance and Romance: Democracy and Comedy in the Early Hellenistic Period -- Resilient Democracy and the Rise of Romantic Comedy -- The Politics of Marriage and the Comic Marriage Plot -- Comedy's Constitutive Political Silence -- Constituting Citizens: The Laws of Genre and State -- Comedy's Poetics of Political Membership -- Opposites Attract: Rape, Romance, and Democratic Selection -- The Power of Love: Female Selection and Male Education -- Reproduction and Resistance -- 2. Reproducing Democracy in Oligarchic and Autocratic Athens -- The Reproducibility of Athenian Democracy -- The Policies and Politics of Demetrius of Phaleron: Law, Power, and Prior Restraint -- Athens and the Antigonids: The Failed Foundation of Hellenistic Democracy -- "Romantic" Resistance: Comedy and the Sterility of Empire -- 3. Making Citizens in Comedy and Court -- Gender and Democratic Identity -- The Importance of Acting Athenian -- Engendering Egalitarianism -- The Politics of Seduction -- Passionate Protagonists and Practical Citizens -- The Comic Romance Narrative: Marrying Interest and Necessity -- Staging a Biopolitics of Democratic Citizenship -- Democratic Reproduction in the Aspis -- 4. The Ethics of Democracy in Menander's Dyskolos -- The Politics of Love at First Sight -- The Democratic Logic of the Comic Plot -- The Class Politics of Sexual Conduct -- Performing Egalitarianism -- Ethical Identity and the Democratization of Social Relations -- Marriage Exchange and the Critique of Ideology -- Egalitarianism and Inclusion -- 5. The Politics of Sexuality in Drama and Democratic Athens: The Case of Menander's Samia -- The Father-Son Romance -- Forensic Theater: Staging Comedy as Court -- The Consequences of Nonconjugal Cohabitation -- Demeas's Defense: Revising the Tragic Family Plot.

Shame, Poverty, and Anger: The Politics of Affect -- The Work of Prostitutes: The Importance of a Gender Stereotype -- The Fragility of Manhood -- 6. The Mercenary Romance: Gender and Civic Education in the Perikeiromenē and Misoumenos -- Socializing the Mercenary Lover -- Power and Punishment: Problems in the Perikeiromenē -- Learning the Language of Law: The Embedded Drama of Civic Education -- Gender and International Relations -- The Return of the Repressed: Gender and the Constraints of Genre -- Negotiations of Martial and Marital Values in the Misoumenos -- The Conquering Captive: Genre and Gender Inversion -- Civic Reciprocity and the Revision of Epic Manhood -- Ethics and Comedy's Construction of Transnational or Hellenic Citizenship -- 7. Trials of Masculinity in Democratic Discourse and Menander's Sikyōnioi -- The Loss of the Citizen-Soldier Ideal -- The Macedonian Question and Athenian Civic Identity -- The Moral Manliness of the Democratic Man -- Menander's Sikyōnioi: The Male Recognition Plot -- Ideology and Intertextuality -- Moschion's Revealing Complexion -- The Lastauros: An Anti-Macedonian Tradition? -- Stratophanes' Embodied Biography -- Metadrama and the Illusion of Identity -- Remasculinizing and Reproducing the Democratic State -- 8. Conclusion: Inevitable Reproduction? -- Bibliography -- Acknowledgments -- Index Locorum -- General Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- R -- S -- T -- V -- W -- X -- Z.