In Greek and Roman antiquity, a festive procession through the streets (e.g. in honour of a god or a victor, or to the house of a friend) accompanied by music, carousing and other merrymaking. Songs were sung, such as the Encomium, which was originally the song of praise to escort a victor home. Some official kōmoi took place in daylight; private kōmoi might occur at night, following a Symposium. A famous depiction of a kōmos is that of the Brygos cup at Würzburg (see illustration). References to a kōmos appear in The Shield of Heracles (dating from the late 6th century bce), and the kōmos may have developed from the increasingly important cult of Dionysus. Singers in the kōmos were called kōmōidoi, a term that later came to be applied to actors, singers and poets of comic lyrics, to the comic chorus as a whole, or to the performance itself. The kōmos continued until late antiquity; attacked by St Paul (Romans xiii.13, Galatians v.21), it declined under the influence of the Church.
In late antiquity the name ‘Comus’ was also given to the leader of a band of revellers, and in this guise is well known through A Maske presented at Ludlow Castle, 1634 (also known as Comus) by Milton, which has been set to music several times (Henry Lawes, 1634; Arne, 1737–8; Hugh Wood, Scenes from Comus, 1965).
M. Lamer: ‘Komos’, Paulys Real-Encyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft, xi/2 (Stuttgart, 1922), 1286–1304
A. Pickard-Cambridge: Dithyramb, Tragedy and Comedy (Oxford, 1927, rev. 2/1962 by T.B.L. Webster), 33
A. Pickard-Cambridge: The Dramatic Festivals of Athens (Oxford, 1953, rev. 2/1968 by J. Gould and D.M. Lewis), 279–305
M. Heath: ‘Receiving the kōmos: the Context and Performance of Epinician’, American Journal of Philology, cix (1988), 180–95
K.A. Morgan: ‘Pindar the Professional and the Rhetoric of the kōmos’, Classical Philology, lxxxviii (1993), 1–15
GEOFFREY CHEW/THOMAS J. MATHIESEN