Preface

This collection has a long history. It began as a panel on cognitive approaches to Greek comic fragments at the classical association conference hosted by Swansea University shortly after the pandemic in 2022. Several of the papers presented there have found their way into the present volume, while others were commissioned and added at a later stage. We remember with particular sadness David Konstan, who contributed a brilliant paper on emotions in new comedy fragments, co-authored with Stavroula Kiritsi. David passed away in 2024 before he was able to respond to the reviewers’ comments and prepare the chapter for publication, and for this reason we were ultimately unable to include it in the collection. His intellectual generosity, encouragement, and unfailing kindness accompanied the project from its earliest stages, and we felt his support throughout the preparation of the volume. We would also like to express our warmest gratitude to Douglas Cairns for his perceptive comments and valuable suggestions, which greatly improved the volume. We are especially grateful to one of the anonymous reviewers for suggesting the title of the collection, which we immediately loved and were delighted to adopt. Finally, we are deeply grateful to the editorial board of BICS for welcoming the project and for their generous and constructive collaboration throughout the publication process.