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10 books match the query 'Aristophanes'

cover of A Commentary on Aristophanes' Knights

A Commentary on Aristophanes' Knights

Carl Arne Anderson and T. Keith Dix

University of Michigan Press, 2020

A Commentary on Aristophanes’ Knights presents a fresh look at the play that cemented Aristophanes’ reputation as a rising star in comic theater. Knights offers an examination of social and political life in ancient Athens during the empire-destroying Peloponnesian War, as well as giving us Aristophanes’ comic send-up of the dangerous populist demagogue Cleon. This is a thoroughly modern commentary on a key play in the theatrical genre of Old Comedy, which satirized virtually every aspect of Athenian life in a period when Athens was at the height of its power and international prestige.

In addition to the complete Greek text and commentary, this volume includes a substantial introduction to the playwright’s career and to the historical and political background of the play. It includes advice for students on grammar and syntax, meter, festivals and staging, as well as topical and literary references and allusions that will help guide students to a mature appreciation of the comedy’s humor, seriousness, and artistic quality. Priced and sized for classroom use, this is the first full commentary on Knights since 1901 and will be widely welcomed.

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cover of Aristophanes and the Cloak of Comedy: Affect, Aesthetics, and the Canon

Aristophanes and the Cloak of Comedy

Affect, Aesthetics, and the Canon

Mario Telò

University of Chicago Press, 2016

The Greek playwright Aristophanes (active 427–386 BCE) is often portrayed as the poet who brought stability, discipline, and sophistication to the rowdy theatrical genre of Old Comedy. In this groundbreaking book, situated within the affective turn in the humanities, Mario Telò explores a vital yet understudied question: how did this view of Aristophanes arise, and why did his popularity eventually eclipse that of his rivals?

Telò boldly traces Aristophanes’s rise, ironically, to the defeat of his play Clouds at the Great Dionysia of 423 BCE. Close readings of his revised Clouds and other works, such as Wasps, uncover references to the earlier Clouds, presented by Aristophanes as his failed attempt to heal the audience, who are reflected in the plays as a kind of dysfunctional father. In this proto-canonical narrative of failure, grounded in the distinctive feelings of different comic modes, Aristophanic comedy becomes cast as a prestigious object, a soft, protective cloak meant to shield viewers from the debilitating effects of competitors’ comedies and restore a sense of paternal responsibility and authority. Associations between afflicted fathers and healing sons, between audience and poet, are shown to be at the center of the discourse that has shaped Aristophanes’s canonical dominance ever since.
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cover of Aristophanes' Clouds: A Commentary

Aristophanes' Clouds

A Commentary

S. Douglas Olson

University of Michigan Press, 2021

This is the first substantial commentary on Clouds since Dover’s 1968 edition. Intended for intermediate Greek students at undergraduate and graduate levels, the commentary pays careful attention to the basic characteristics of ancient Greek syntax, as well as to how Greek words are formed and can be analyzed.  It offers robust staging notes, information about daily life in late 5th-century Athens, and constant reference to the rhetorical and dramatic strategies of the text. Full support is offered for those interested in the metrical structure of the songs, but in a way that allows instructors to leave such issues aside, should they choose to do so. The first and second appendices offer a basic means of entry into the rich but complex world of the comic fragments. An English-language bibliography is provided. The edition will interest professional classicists of all sorts seeking an accessible introduction to one of Aristophanes’ greatest plays, to philosophers concerned with Socrates and the sophistic movement, and to theater professionals who wish to stage the play.

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cover of Four Comedies

Four Comedies

Aristophanes

University of Michigan Press, 1969

Contains Lysistrata, The Congresswomen, The Acharnians, and The Frogs
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cover of Lysistrata: A New Verse Translation

Lysistrata

A New Verse Translation

Aristophanes, Translated by David Mulroy, with Introduction and Notes

University of Wisconsin Press, 2020

Aristophanes, a native Athenian and the leading exponent of Greek comedy, was born c. 450 BCE. Today forty-three of his plays are known by title; eleven survive. The most famous of these is the whimsical fantasy Lysistrata.

A perennial classroom and stage favorite as well as the basis of Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq, the play is as relevant today as it was 2,500 years ago. The premise is simplicity itself: to end the Peloponnesian War, women decide to withhold sex from their husbands until the fighting stops.

The play is by turns raucous, bawdy, frantic, and funny. David Mulroy’s exciting new translation retains the original’s verse format, racy jokes, and vibrancy—setting it apart from previous efforts, which are typically reproduced as prose or depart from meaning and meter. His introduction offers a concise summary of Aristophanes’ life and social milieu, including a brief overview of the Peloponnesian War, which took place during the playwright’s lifetime. The appendices include guides on translating meter and Greek pronunciation for aspiring thespians.
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cover of Pericles on Stage: Political Comedy in Aristophanes' Early Plays

Pericles on Stage

Political Comedy in Aristophanes' Early Plays

By Michael Vickers

University of Texas Press, 1996

Since the eighteenth century, classical scholars have generally agreed that the Greek playwright Aristophanes did not as a matter of course write "political" plays. Yet, according to an anonymous Life of Aristophanes, when Dionysius the tyrant of Syracuse wanted to know about the government of Athens, Plato sent him a copy of Aristophanes' Clouds.

In this boldly revisionist work, Michael Vickers convincingly argues that in his earlier plays, Aristophanes in fact commented on the day-to-day political concerns of Athenians. Vickers reads the first six of Aristophanes' eleven extant plays in a way that reveals the principal characters to be based in large part on Pericles and his ward Alcibiades.

According to Vickers, the plays of Aristophanes—far from being nonpolitical—actually allow us to gauge the reaction of the Athenian public to the events that followed Pericles' death in 429 B.C., to the struggle for the political succession, and to the problems presented by Alcibiades' emergence as one of the most powerful figures in the state. This view of Aristophanes reaffirms the central role of allegory in his work and challenges all students of ancient Greece to rethink long-held assumptions about this important playwright.

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cover of Plato and Aristophanes: Comedy, Politics, and the Pursuit of a Just Life

Plato and Aristophanes

Comedy, Politics, and the Pursuit of a Just Life

Marina Marren

Northwestern University Press, 2022

In Plato and Aristophanes, Marina Marren contends that our search for communal justice must start with self-examination. The realization that there are things that we cannot know about ourselves unless we become the subject of a joke is integral to such self-scrutiny. Jokes provide a new perspective on our politics and ethics; they are essential to our civic self-awareness.
 
Marren makes this case by delving into Plato’s Republic, a foundational work of political philosophy. While the Republic straightforwardly condemns the decadence and greed of a tyrant, Plato’s attack on political idealism is both solemn and comedic. In fact, Plato draws on the same comedic stock and tropes as do Aristophanes’s plays. Marren’s book strikes up an innovative conversation between three works by Aristophanes—Assembly Women, Knights, and Birds—and Plato’s philosophy, prompting important questions about individual convictions and one’s personal search for justice. These dialogic works offer critiques of tyranny that are by turns brilliant, scathing, and exuberant, making light of faults and ideals alike. Philosophical comedy exposes despotism in individuals as well as systems of government claiming to be just and good. This critique holds as much bite against contemporary injustices as it did at the time of Aristophanes and Plato.
 
An ingenious new work by an emerging scholar, Plato and Aristophanes shows that comedy—in tandem with philosophy and politics—is essential to self-examination. And without such examination, there is no hope for a just life.
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cover of Socrates and Aristophanes

Socrates and Aristophanes

Leo Strauss

University of Chicago Press, 1996

In one of his last books, Socrates and Aristophanes, Leo Strauss's examines the confrontation between Socrates and Aristophanes in Aristophanes' comedies. Looking at eleven plays, Strauss shows that this confrontation is essentially one between poetry and philosophy, and that poetry emerges as an autonomous wisdom capable of rivaling philosophy.

"Strauss gives us an impressive addition to his life's work—the recovery of the Great Tradition in political philosophy. The problem the book proposes centers formally upon Socrates. As is typical of Strauss, he raises profound issues with great courage. . . . [He addresses] a problem that has been inherent in Western life ever since [Socrates'] execution: the tension between reason and religion. . . . Thus, we come to Aristophanes, the great comic poet, and his attack on Socrates in the play The Clouds. . . [Strauss] translates it into the basic problem of the relation between poetry and philosophy, and resolves this by an analysis of the function of comedy in the life of the city." —Stanley Parry, National Review
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cover of The Court of Comedy

The Court of Comedy

Wilfred E. Major

The Ohio State University Press, 2013

The Court of Comedy: Aristophanes, Rhetoric, and Democracy in Fifth-Century Athens, by Wilfred E. Major, analyzes how writers of comedy in Classical Greece satirized the emerging art of rhetoric and its role in political life. In the fifth century BCE, the development of rhetoric proceeded hand in hand with the growth of democracy both on Sicily and at Athens. In turn, comic playwrights in Athens, most notably Aristophanes, lampooned oratory as part of their commentary on the successes and failures of the young democracy.
 
This innovative study is the first book to survey all the surviving comedy from the fifth century BCE on these important topics. The evidence reveals that Greek comedy provides a revealing commentary on the incipient craft of rhetoric before its formal conventions were stabilized. Furthermore, Aristophanes’ depiction of rhetoric and of Athenian democratic institutions indicates that he fundamentally supports the Athenian democracy and not, as is often argued, oligarchic opposition to it.
 
These conclusions confirm recent work that reinterprets the early development of rhetoric in Classical Greece and offer fresh perspectives on the debate over the role of comedy in early Greek democracy. Throughout, Major capitalizes on recent progress in understanding of the performance dynamics of Classical Greek theater.
 
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cover of Three Comedies

Three Comedies

Aristophanes

University of Michigan Press, 1969

Contains The Birds, The Clouds, and The Wasps
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