Product Description

The plays in this volume all contain Aristophanes' trademark bawdy comedy and dazzling verbal agility. In The Birds, two frustrated Athenians join the birds to build the utopian city of 'Much Cuckoo in the Clouds'. The Knights is a venomous satire on Cleon, a prominent Athenian demagogue, while The Assembly Women deals with the battle of the sexes as the women of Athens infiltrate the all-male Assembly in disguise. The lengthy conflict with Sparta is the subject of Peace, inspired by the hope of a settlement in 421 BC, and Wealth reflects on the economic catastrophe that hit Athens after the war.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #25485 in Books
• Published on: 2003-09-25
• Original language: Greek
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

Synopsis
The plays in this volume all contain Aristophanes' trademark bawdy comedy and dazzling verbal agility. In The Birds, two frustrated Athenians join the birds to build the utopian city of 'Much Cuckoo in the Clouds'. The Knights is a venomous satire on Cleon, a prominent Athenian demagogue, while The Assembly Women deals with the battle of the sexes as the women of Athens infiltrate the all-male Assembly in disguise. The lengthy conflict with Sparta is the subject of Peace, inspired by the hope of a settlement in 421 BC, and Wealth reflects on the economic catastrophe that hit Athens after the war.

About the Author
Little is known about Aristophanes' life (c. 445BC-c.386BC), but there is a portrait of him in Plato's Symposium. His first comedy was produced when he was 20 and he wrote 40 plays in the course of his life. David Barrett has translated a number of ancient Greek texts for Penguin Classics.

Customer Reviews

Classic translations of a comic genius
Few comic writers pre-date Aristophanes. But few, if any, resonate more strongly with us. His comic traits - wit, absurd, satire - are precisely those features that prove popular today.

One reason why this Penguin edition excels is that its English catches the mischievous and fantastic spirit of the originals so unfailingly. Although this edition first appeared as long ago as 1978 and despite lacking Greek-alphabet annotation - an absence that may deter the more classical Classicist - it more than compensates with its inspired translations and illuminating introductions and commentaries.

There are actually two translators at work in this volume - AH Sommerstein and David Barrett. The first's strength is putting the comedies in their social-historical context. The latter's forte is a no-nonsense, pragmatic approach best exemplified, perhaps, in his excellent prefatory essay. He acknowledges that we'll probably never fully understand several of Aristophanes' jokes made at the expense of lesser-known named individuals (like Smicythion in The Assemblywomen). But rather than despair, he prefers to see these ancient joke-butts as allegorical and representing 'facets of ourselves, isolated expressly to be ridiculed'.

And what of the plays on offer? The best known, The Birds, is in several ways the least typical: it is apolitical; there's no Cleon-baiting; there's very little that's topical. But alongside the odd groan-inducing pun, there's even some lyric poetry from the chorus - the very core (caw caw) of these Old Comedy competition plays: 'Set free the notes of the hallowed songs/That pour divinely from you, lamenting/Itys, our dead son,/Your tawny throat throbbing with liquid music...'. It isn't really lyric verse that Aristophanes is renowned for so much as comic invention, of course. Although, in Barrett's opinion, The Assemblywomen is structurally the weakest of these plays, it is probably the most effective and the funniest in performance. And like the others, it illuminates aspects of ordinary Athenian lives otherwise unrecorded for posterity. We learn that pole-cats, rather than modern, domesticated cats, were given the job of catching mice around the house; that chick-peas were served as 'nibbles' with wine; and much else.

At its best, the Penguin Classics imprint brings what could be arcane and scholarly material to a wider audience. Aristophanes, a comic genius for anyone who knows how to laugh, deserves such an audience. Here is comedy in all its variety - wit, wordplay, slapstick, visual and bawdy humour - conveyed with a freshness and vigour in translations that transcend the millennia.

Classics Must Buy
For any one studying Classical Civilisations, this book is an excellent example of a Greek comedy works by Aristophanes. Beware the comedy in this play is very difficult to understand, it no bedtime read. I look forward to reading his other books.