Oh My, the ancient Greeks knew how to have fun.

Amusing, risqué, clever, insightful and, if you have a good translation —or if you can read Greek—, poetic, ( )

4/17/22

Sometimes things do not translate well from one time to another (or one language to another, either). Some of the plays, such as the Birds, the Frogs, and Lysistrata, are interesting and fun plays. Many of the rest simply are too tied to the political players of the time to be compelling. It is difficult to find much relevant to today in plays extolling monarchy at the expense of democracy, so those plays are only interesting as a curiosity, since the story lines are only okay. There was some interest in the idea of a man ascending to heaven on a dung beetle to seek peace, but the story felt flat and underdeveloped. I realize it is not fair to a work out of its time to judge it by the standards of our own time, but I am not a classical scholar, and am not able to judge it by the standards of its own time (to be fair to me, I don't think many classical scholars are really able to do that either; they are just able to understand where it fit, and the political references, in a more detailed manner). Overall, it was a disappointment. ( )

Aristophanes is the great comic playwright of Ancient Greece, and set the standard and form of comedy in the Western World. Moreover, his plays are often cited in discussions of what ordinary life was like in the city of Athens in the times of Socrates. No less a figure than Plato accused Aristophanes' play The Clouds of contributing to the prosecution and death of Socrates. Aristophanes even appears in Plato's The Symposium as one of the guests. From The Birds we get the concept of Cloudcuckooland. His play Lysistrata was assigned me in high school (and I loved it by the way) but it was that Aristophanes was listed on 100 Significant books on Good Reading that gave me incentive to read the rest. In other words, yes, Aristophanes plays are one of those fundamental works any educated person should know--reason alone to become acquainted. But they're also fun--painless to read. Not stodgy--in fact often bawdy and inventive. In Peace his hero rides to Heaven--on a dung beetle. Lysistrata and Ecclesiazusae are both anti-war and feminist--yes, really.

Or so it strikes me, although I'm sure there are scholars of the period who in a close analysis might find the misogyny of Ancient Greece peeking through--in say pointing out how women use sex and deception in Lysistrata to get their way. But what we have here is arguably Aristophanes greatest (certainly his most famous) play, with a strong female title protagonist, who leads women from warring states to form a sex strike to stop a war. What's not to love?

Well, yes, these plays feature topical satire that often does depend on the context of Athenian politics during the Peloponnesian War, so loads of annotations, footnotes is a good. So is a natural, flowing translation. (The first time I read Lysistrata, I found the way the translator gave the Spartan women a Scottish dialect rather bizarre.) But those two requirements aside, these are still capable of inspiring laughter. ( )

Complete and unabridged, two volumes in one. Literally and completely translated from Greek ( )