Product Description

The master of ancient Greek comic drama, Aristophanes combined slapstick, humour and cheerful vulgarity with acute political observations. In The Frogs, written during the Peloponnesian War, Dionysus descends to the Underworld to bring back a poet who can help Athens in its darkest hour, and stages a great debate to help him decide between the traditional wisdom of Aeschylus and the brilliant modernity of Euripides. The clash of generations and values is also the object of Aristophanes’ satire in The Wasps, in which an old-fashioned father and his loose-living son come to blows and end up in court. And in The Poet and the Women, Euripides, accused of misogyny, persuades a relative to infiltrate an all-women festival to find out whether revenge is being plotted against him.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #63568 in Books
• Published on: 2007-03-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

About the Author
Aristophanes was born, probably in Athens, c. 449 BC and died between 386 and 380 BC. Little is known about his life, but there is a portrait of him in Plato's Symposium. He was twice threatened with prosecution in the 420s for his outspoken attacks on the prominent politician Cleon, but in 405 he was publicly honored and crowned for promoting Athenian civic unity in The Frogs. Aristophanes had his first comedy produced when he was about twenty-one, and wrote forty plays in all. The eleven surviving plays of Aristophanes are published in the Penguin Classics series as The Birds and Other Plays, Lysistrata and Other Plays, and The Wasps/The Poet and the Women/The Frogs. Translated by David Barrett Revised Translation with an Introduction and Notes by Shomit Dutta

Customer Reviews

Really funny
I studied 'Wasps' and 'Frogs' for seventh form Classical studies this year and they're really, really funny. I think this edition is good because the footnotes are excellent, the introduction is good, and because the translation is relatively recent (1970?) and in quite simple language, these plays are good to study at school because the majority of people understand what's going on. Also, the humour in these plays hasn't faded at all even though they were written in approximately 400BC. These plays can be studied at either a simple level (discussing what types of humour are used etc) or at a more complex level (where you get into all the issues surrounding the plays: war with Sparta, generation gap, inefficiency of the jury system etc...).