Books by Aristophanes

This is a new edition, the first for thirty years, with introduction and commentary, of the Greek text of one of only eleven preserved plays of Aristophanes, the greatest master of the Athenian comic theatre. The commentary focuses on the realities of day-to-day life in the ancient world and includes an examination of the practical problems of staging.

Aristophanes' plays were produced for the festival theatre of classical Athens in the fifth century BC and were remarkable for encompassing the whole gamut of humour, from brilliantly inventive fantasy to obscene vulgarity. This translation of Aristophanes' comedies makes available one of the world's great comic dramatists.

Aristophanes (c. 450-c. 386 BCE) has been admired since antiquity for his wit, fantasy, language, and satire. Over forty of his plays were read in antiquity, from which nearly a thousand fragments survive. These provide a fuller picture of the poet's comic vitality and a wealth of information and insights about his world.

Lysistrata is the third and last of Aristophanes' peace plays. It is a dream of peace, of how the women could help to achieve an honourable settlement, conceived when Athens was going through its most desperate crisis since the Persian War. This fully annotated English translation of the play presents facing translation, commentary and notes.

This edition of Aristophanes' comedy is intended for students and scholars. It includes an examination of the comic and dramatic qualities of the play and an introduction to the text covering aspects of the play from historical background to metrical explanations and manuscript tradition.

This edition of the play brings it up to date in terms of the advances made in Aristophanic scholarship in the past 60 years. It reports on manuscripts, papyri and testimonial sources of the text, offering an account of its history and a review of the transmission of the entire Aristophanic corpus.

The Penn Greek Drama Series presents original literary translations of the entire corpus of classical Greek drama: tragedies, comedies, and satyr plays. It is the only contemporary series of all the surviving work of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Arist

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.

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.

This edition of Aristophanes' play contains a full introduction which covers all aspects of the text, from the manuscript tradition to details of the playwright himself. The play is supplemented by a commentary designed for readers from sixth formers to academics.

This mixture of social and political satire, bawdy with passages of lyrical beauty, offers an insight into ancient Athens and its theatre. McLeish also has translated the plays of Sophocles and Aeschylus.

This is an abridgement of Nan Dunbar's 1995 Oxford edition of Birds, one of Aristophanes' masterpieces (and the source of the word 'Cloudcuckooland'). The introduction and notes retain all the material designed to help the less advanced student of Greek to understand, interpret, and enjoy the play. Aristophanes' references to birds are elucidated in the light of modern ornithological knowledge.

This new abridged edition of Aristophanes' Frogs provides the students with the text of the play and includes a detailed commentary and full introduction. Sir Kenneth Dover has now abridged the acclaimed edition which he first produced in 1993 and added a vocabulary which eliminates the need for recourse to a lexicon. The result is an edition which fits much more closely the needs of students.

This work contains a commentary on one of the most famous comedies from Ancient Greece, Aristophanes' "Frogs", as well as the complete Greek text. It also features a comprehensive introduction, and offers help with translation.

A volume in the acclaimed Penn Greek Drama Series containing Wasps, Lysistrata, Frogs, and The Sexual Congress.

In this edition of one of the masterpieces of Athenian Old Comedy, Olson offers an introduction, a text based on a collation of the manuscripts, and a massive literary and historical commentary. All the Greek in the introduction and commentary not cited for technical reasons is translated, making much of the edition accessible to non-specialists.