Knights was the first play to be produced by Aristophanes on his own behalf. In it, he launched a violent attack on Cleon, the leading politician of the day, on the whole style of leadership that he represented and on a system which seemed to guarantee that a bad leader could be displaced by a worse. This edition presents the Greek text with facing-page translation, introduction, commentary and notes.

This is an English translation of Aristophanes' popular comedy in which the god Dionysus seeks to bring the great dramatist Euripides from Hades, where he encounters another great Classical playwright, Aeschylus. Includes background material on the historical and cultural context of this work, suggestions for further reading, and notes. The Focus Classical Library provides close translations with notes and essays to provide access to understanding Greek culture and the roots of contemporary thought.

Originally adapted for the stage, Peter Meineck's revised translations achieve a level of fidelity appropriate for classroom use while managing to preserve the wit and energy that led The New Yorker to judge his Clouds The best Greek drama we've ever seen anywhere," and The Times Literary Supplement to describe his Wasps as "Hugely enjoyable and very, very funny. A general Introduction, introductions to the plays, and detailed notes on staging, history, religious practice and myth combine to make this a remarkably useful teaching text.

English translation. "Lysistrata", the most popular of Aristophanes' plays, appeals to the modern reader because of its lively and imaginative plot, memorable heroine, good jokes, and appeal for peace and tolerance between nations and between the sexes. Includes background material on the historical and cultural context of this work, suggestions for further reading, notes, and map.

This line-for-line translation of Aristophanes' best-known comedy features an Introduction on Old Comedy, and the place of Clouds and Aristophanic comedy within it. Footnotes and more detailed endnotes further distinguish this edition of a play famous for its caricature of Socrates and of the "new learning."

Aristophanes's satirical masterpieces, immensely popular with the Athenian public, were frequently crude, even obscene. His plays revealed to his contemporaries, and now teach us today, that when those in power act obscenely, patriotic obscenity is a fitting response. Until now English translations have failed to capture Aristophanes's poetic genius. Aaron Poochigian, the first poet-classicist to tackle these plays in a generation, offers "effortlessly readable and genuinely theatrical" (Simon Armitage) versions of four of Aristophanes's most entertaining, provocative and lyrically ingenious comedies, finally giving twenty-first-century readers a sense of the subversive pleasure audiences felt when these works were first performed on the Athenian stage.

Aristophanes, one of the world's greatest comic dramatists, has been admired since antiquity for his iridescent wit and beguiling fantasy, exuberant language, and brilliant satire of the social, intellectual, and political life of Athens at its height. This is the fourth and final volume in the new Loeb Classical Library edition of his plays.

"Frogs" was produced in 405 BCE, shortly after the deaths of Sophocles and Euripides. Dionysus, the patron god of theater, journeys to the underworld to retrieve Euripides. There he is recruited to judge a contest between the traditional Aeschylus and the modern Euripides, a contest that yields both sparkling comedy and insight on ancient literary taste. In" Assemblywomen" Athenian women plot to save Athens from male misgovernance. They transfer power to themselves and institute a new social order in which all inequalities based on wealth, age, and beauty are eliminatedwith raucously comical results. The gentle humor and straightforward morality of" Wealth" made it the most popular of Aristophanes' plays from classical times to the Renaissance. Here the god Wealth is cured of his blindness; his newfound ability to distinguish good people from bad brings playfully portrayed social consequences.

This volume is the first edition with commentary since 1907 of AristophanesAe last surviving play, in which, as so often before, an audacious and imaginative hero finds a miraculous remedy for the all-too-real ills of the contemporary worlduin this case the concentration of wealth in the hands of those who donAet deserve it at the expense of those who do. To achieve this he needs the aid of no less than three gods, and the play contains the fullest single surviving account of a visit to a sanctuary of the healing god Asclepius. This volume will include the ADDENDA to all previous plays, but the INDEXES proved far more extensive than anticipated and will now be published as a separate volume 12 to complete the Aristophanes series.

Richard Janko's acclaimed translation of Aristotle's Poetics is accompanied by the most comprehensive commentary available in English that does not presume knowledge of the original Greek. Two other unique features are Janko's translations with notes of both the Tractatus Coislinianus , which is argued to be a summary of the lost second book of the Poetics, and fragments of Aristotle's dialogue On Poets, including recently discovered texts about catharsis, which appear in English for the first time.

Ecclesiazusae, probably produced in 391 BC, is at once a typically Aristophanic fantasy of gender inversion, obscenity and farce, the earliest surviving work in the western Utopian tradition, and the source of a blueprint for a communist society on which Plato may well have drawn in his Republic. This edition attempts to set the play, more closely than has usually been done, against the political background at the time of its production, when Athens has just spurned what proved to be the last opportunity to escape from a war it did not have the resources to fight, and to define the details of staging as precisely as the text will allow. [Greek text with facing-page translation, commentary and notes.]

This volume completes the twelve-volume series The Comedies of Aristophanes, begun in 1980, and is comprised of comprehensive indexes to the preceding eleven volumes. The book is divided into three parts: I. Texts and Passages, II. Persons, and III. General. Alan H Sommerstein is Professor of Greek and Director of the Centre for Ancient Drama and its Reception, University of Nottingham.

This volume completes the twelve-volume series The Comedies of Aristophanes, begun in 1980, and is comprised of comprehensive indexes to the preceding eleven volumes. The book is divided into three parts: I. Texts and Passages, II. Persons, and III. General. Alan H Sommerstein is Professor of Greek and Director of the Centre for Ancient Drama and its Reception, University of Nottingham.

Aristophanes's classic send-up of rivalry within the ultra-competitive world of fifth-century Athenian theatre wins a new lease on life in this fresh line-for-line translation by Peter Meineck. Premiered in 2021 by Aquila Theatre and accompanied here by Meineck's notes and wide-ranging Introduction, this Frogs offers the best view yet of a high-stakes afterlife contest between two of Athens's late great playwrights. Both are undisputed masters of tragedy. But only one can win and return to save the city.

The eleven plays by Aristophanes that have come down to us intact brilliantly illuminate the eventful period spanned by his forty-year career, beginning with the first production in 427 BCE. But the Athenians knew much more of his work: over forty plays by Aristophanes were read in antiquity, of which nearly a thousand fragments survive. These provide a fuller picture of the poet's ever astonishing comic vitality and a wealth of information and insights about his world. Jeffrey Henderson's new, widely acclaimed Loeb edition of Aristophanes is completed by this volume containing what survives from, and about, his lost plays, hitherto inaccessible to the nonspecialist, and incorporating the enormous scholarly advances that have been achieved in recent years.

Each fragmentary play is prefaced by a summary of what can be inferred about its plot, characters, themes, theatricality, and topical significance. Also included in this edition are the ancient reports about Aristophanes' life, works, and influence on the later comic tradition.

Lampooned in 406 B.C.E. in a blistering Aristophanic satire, Socrates was tried in 399 B.C.E. on a charge of corrupting the youth, convicted by a jury of about five hundred of his peers, and condemned to death. Glimpsed today through the extant writings of his contemporaries and near-contemporaries, he remains for us as compelling, enigmatic, and elusive a figure as Jesus or Buddha. Although present-day (like ancient Greek) opinion on the real Socrates diverges widely, six classic texts that any informed judgment of him must take into account appear together, for the first time, in this volume. Those of Plato and Xenophon appear in new, previously unpublished translations that combine accuracy, accessibility, and readability; that of Aristophanes' Clouds offers these same qualities in an unbowdlerized translation that captures brilliantly the bite of Aristophanes' wit. An Introduction to each text and judicious footnotes provide crucial background information and important cross-references.

Aristophanes is the only surviving representative of Greek Old Comedy, the exuberant, satirical form of festival drama which flourished during the heyday of classical Athenian culture in the fifth century BC. His plays are characterized by extraordinary combinations of fantasy and satire, sophistication and vulgarity, formality and freedom. Birds is an escapist fantasy in which two dissatisfied Athenians, in defiance of men and gods, bring about a city of birds, the eponymous Cloudcuckooland. In Lysistrata the heroine of the play organizes a sex-strike and the wives of Athens occupy the Akropolis in an attempt to restore peace to the city. The main source of comedy in the Assembly-Women is a similar usurpation of male power as the women attempt to reform Athenian society along utopian-communist lines. Finally, Wealth is Aristophanes' last surviving comedy, in which Ploutos, the god of wealth is cured of his blindness and the remarkable social consequences of his new discrimination are exemplified. This is the first complete verse translation of Aristophanes' comedies to appear for more than twenty-five years and makes freshly available one of the most remarkable comic playwrights in the entire Western tradition, complete with an illuminating introduction including play by play analysis and detailed notes. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

His poetry sings of the beauty of the natural world and offers a vision of the paradise that the world could be, but it is also imbued with a deep and painful awareness of the dark abyss that it threatens to become. For Vrettakos, the poet has a role to play in this struggle to determine the fate of the world. He is the champion of light and truth, the high priest of beauty, whose duty it is to celebrate the world, proclaiming the cosmic message of love as that which cuts paths across the darkness. He knows only too well, however, that the poets voice, like Gods, is seldom heeded. Works translated from Aeschylus; Aesop; Alexander The Great; Anaxagoras; Antisthenes; Aristotle; Aristophanes; Bias of Priene; Chilon of Sparta; Cleobulus of Lindos; Democritus; Demosthenes; Diogenes; Epicurus; Epictetus; Euripides; Heraclitus; Hesiod; Hippocrates; Homer; Isocrates; Menander; Periander; Pindar; Pittacus of Mytilene; Plato; Plutarch; Protagoras; Pythagoras; Socrates; Solon; Sophocles; Thales of Miletus; Theocritus; Thucydides; Xenophon; Zeno Of Citium.

Estas obras marcan el fin de la comedia anligua de Aristofanes. En Las nubes y Las ranas el tema comun es el de la educacion en relacion con la vida intelectual de Atenas. Ambas son esplendidos documentos de ese mundo intelectual y poetico, caricaturizado a veces en exceso. En Pluto el tema de la educacion es tambien el punto de partida, pero sobre todo la distribucion injusta de la riqueza.

Another in the Focus Classical Library modern translations of works from the Classical world. This series of translations is noted for the clarity of translation and fidelity to the intent of the original work, with notes and an introduction that provide the student with access to the intent of the author in the original. As such these works are outstanding for their ability to provide the reader with the sense of the original as it was understood in its time and an excellent starting point for any interpretation or adaptation. The "Acharnians" is one of Aristophanes' anti-war comedies.

This is an English translation of Aristophanes' greatest comedy the Birds and is the story of birds taking control of the government. Includes background material on the historical and cultural context of this work, suggestions for further reading, and notes. Focus Classical Library provides close translations with notes and essays to provide access to understanding Greek culture.

Aristophanes (ca. 446-386 BCE), one of the world's greatest comic dramatists, has been admired since antiquity for his iridescent wit and beguiling fantasy, exuberant language, and brilliant satire of the social, intellectual, and political life of Athens at its height. In this third volume of a new Loeb Classical Library edition of Aristophanes, Jeffrey Henderson presents a freshly edited Greek text and a lively, unexpurgated translation of three plays with full explanatory notes.

In "Birds" Aristophanes turns from the pointed political satire characteristic of earlier plays to a fantasy that soars literally into the air in search of a carefree world. Here the enterprising protagonists create a utopian counter-Athens, called Cloudcuckooland, ruled by birds. "Lysistrata" blends boisterous comedy and an earnest call for peace. Lysistrata, our first comic heroine, organizes a panhellenic conjugal strike of young wives until their husbands end the war between Athens and Sparta. Athenian women again take center stage in "Women at the Thesmophoria," this time to punish Euripides for portraying them as wicked. Parody of Euripides' plots enlivens this witty confrontation of the sexes.

The ideal single-volume introduction to the greatest masterpieces of ancient comedy
From the fifth to the second century B.C., theatrical comedy flourished in Greece and Rome. This new anthology brings together four essential masterworks of the genre: Aristophanes? bold, imaginative "The Birds"; Menander's "The Girl from Samos," which explores popular contemporary themes of mistaken identity and sexual misbehavior; and two later Roman comic plays?Plautus's "The Brothers Menaechmus," the inspiration for Shakespeare's "The Comedy of Errors"; and Terence's bawdy yet sophisticated double love plot, "The Eunuch." Together, these four plays capture the genius of classical comedy for students, theatergoers, actors, lovers of satire, and anyone interested in the ancient world.