The Knights; Peace; The Birds; The Assembly Women; Wealth: 3

by Aristophanes

This new verse translation of Aristophanes' comedies offers one of the world's great comic dramatists in a form that is both historically faithful and theatrically vigorous. Aristophanes' plays were... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0140443320
• ISBN13: 9780140443325
• Release Date: July 1978
• Publisher: Penguin Group
• Length: 335 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.1" x 7.8"

Customer Reviews

A Review on Aristophanes' Plays

Aristophanes is considered the finest comic playwrite of the Classical Era. This is certainly born out through the selection in this volume. Birds is a comedy about an Athenian who decides to incite the birds to take over the world and replace the classical deities as its rulers. Both Lysistrata and Assembly-Women are about what would happen if the women took over the government. In the former, the women of Greece band together in a sex-strike, to end the Pelopennesian Wars. In the later, the Athenian women use trickery to be elected the the leaders of the democracy, and they institute economic and sexual communism. In the last selection, Wealth, the deity of Wealth, Ploutos, is captured and made to distribute wealth only to the good. However, as Poverty points out, that might not be a good thing. These plays are full of topical comedy, but much of the humor still is funny 2400 years later. The translation is very uncensored, as Greek comedy itself was, so that very little is lost in metaphor. The imagery in some of them is highly amusing. Although this is a great example of the way life was in Classic Athens, these plays are not for the squeamish!!