Download or read book Aristophanes Four Plays Clouds Birds Lysistrata Women of the Assembly written by Aristophanes and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2021-02-16 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Capturing the antic outrageousness and lyrical brilliance of antiquity’s greatest comedies, Aaron Poochigian’s Aristophanes: Four Plays brings these classic dramas to vivid life for a twenty-first century audience. The citizens of ancient Athens enjoyed a freedom of speech as broad as our own. This freedom, parrhesia, the right to say what one pleased, how and when one pleased, and to whom, had no more fervent champion than the brilliant fifth-century comic playwright Aristophanes. His plays, immensely popular with the Athenian public, were frequently crude, even obscene. He ridiculed the great and the good of the city, showing up their hypocrisy and arrogance in ways that went far beyond the standards of good taste, securing the ire (and sometimes the retaliation) of his powerful targets. He showed his contemporaries, and he teaches us now, that when those in power act obscenely, patriotic obscenity is a fitting response. Aristophanes’s satirical masterpieces were also surpassingly virtuosic works of poetry. The metrical variety of his plays has always thrilled readers who can access the original Greek, but until now, English translations have failed to capture their lyrical genius. Aaron Poochigian, the first poet-classicist to tackle these plays in a generation, brings back to life four of Aristophanes’s most entertaining, wickedly crude, and frequently beautiful lyric comedies—the pinnacle of his comic art: · Clouds, a play famous for its caricature of antiquity’s greatest philosopher, Socrates; · Lysistrata, in which a woman convinces her female compatriots to withhold sex from their warmongering lovers unless they negotiate peace; · Birds, in which feathered creatures build a great city and become like gods; · and Women of the Assembly, Aristophones’s most revolutionary play, which inverts the norms of gender and power. Poochigian’s new rendering of these comic masterpieces finally gives contemporary readers a sense of the subversive pleasure Aristophones’s original audiences felt when they were first performed on the Athenian stage.
Download or read book Playing Around Aristophanes written by Alan H. Sommerstein and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alan Sommerstein joined the staff of the University of Nottingham in 1974 and remains there to this day. During this period he has produced a stream of distinguished books, editions and articles on many aspects of Greek drama and society.
Download or read book Frogs and Other Plays written by Aristophanes and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2007-03-01 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Lysistrata written by Aristophanes and published by . This book was released on 1916 with total page 64 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Frogs and Other Plays written by Aristophanes and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This vibrant collection of verse translations of Aristophanes' works-featuring Clouds, Women at the Thesmophoria (or Thesmophoriazusae), and Frogs-combines historical accuracy with a sensitive attempt to capture the rich dramatic and literary qualities of Aristophanic comedy. Including expansive introductions to each play, as well as detailed explanatory notes and an illuminating appendix, this volume presents freshinterpretations of three key works from one of the most original playwrights in the entire Western tradition.
Download or read book Lysistrata and Other Plays written by Aristophanes and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2003-01-30 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Acharnians/The Clouds/Lysistrata 'We women have the salvation of Greece in our hands' Writing at a time of political and social crisis in Athens, the ancient Greek comic playwright Aristophanes was an eloquent, yet bawdy, challenger to the demagogue and the sophist. In Lysistrata and The Acharnians, two pleas for an end to the long war between Athens and Sparta, a band of women on a sex strike and a lone peasant respectively defeat the political establishment. The darker comedy of The Clouds satirizes Athenian philosophers, Socrates in particular, and reflects the uncertainties of a generation in which all traditional religious and ethical beliefs were being challenged. Translated with an Introduction and Notes by Alan H. Sommerstein
Download or read book Four Plays by Aristophanes written by Aristophanes and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1984-11-01 with total page 625 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whether his target is the war between the sexes or his fellow playwright Euripides, Aristophanes is the most important Greek comic dramatist—and one of the greatest comic playwrights of all time. His writing—at once bawdy and delicate—brilliantly fuses serious political satire with pyrotechnical bombast, establishing the tradition of comedy as high art. His messages are as timely and relevant today as they were in ancient Greece, and his plays still provoke laughter—and thought. This volume features four celebrated masterpieces: Lysistrata, The Frogs, The Birds, and The Clouds, translated by three of the most distinguished translators and classicists of our time.
Download or read book The Rivals of Aristophanes written by David Harvey and published by Classical Press of Wales. This book was released on 2002-12-31 with total page 575 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The work of the 'other' comic poets of classical Athens, those who competed with, and in some cases defeated, their (eventually) better-known fellow comedian, Aristophanes, has almost eluded the historical record. The poetry of Cratinus, Phrynichos, Eupolis and the rest has survived only in tantalising, often tiny, fragments and citations. Modern studies in this field have themselves often been difficult of access. Here an exceptional cast of scholars, including most of the leading international authorities, provides a set of 28 interpretative essays to cover every one of these 'other' poets of Athenian Old Comedy for whom significant evidence survives. The work includes a comprehensive bibliography, and is a landmark in the study of Old Comedy.
Download or read book Aristophanes Old and new Comedy Six essays in perspective written by Kenneth J. Reckford and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 1987 with total page 600 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aristophanes' Old-and-New Comedy: Volume I: Six Essays in Perspective
Download or read book Aristophanes written by James Robson and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2013-10-16 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This accessible introduction to the work of one of the world's greatest comic writers tackles key questions posed by Aristophanes' plays, such as staging, humour, songs, obscene language, politics and the modern translation and performance of Aristophanic comedy. The book opens up exciting and contentious areas of Aristophanic scholarship in a way that is engaging and readily comprehensible to a non-specialist audience, never losing sight of the fact that Aristophanes' plays are vibrant literary texts, designed primarily to appeal to a classical Athenian audience as pieces of living drama. Key to the book's appeal is that James Robson conceives of the plays as dynamic texts, containing a treasure trove of information not only about how they might have been performed and received in classical Athens, but also how they might be read and understood today. Most importantly, readers are given the tools and information to make their own minds up about the debates that still rage about Aristophanic comedy in the modern world.
Download or read book Peace written by Aristophanes and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-11-01 with total page 48 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A rollicking attack on war-makers, the farmer-hero makes his famous trip to heaven on a dung beetle to discuss the issues with Zeus.
Download or read book The Birds and Other Plays written by Aristophanes and published by ReadHowYouWant.com. This book was released on 2008-11-28 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Books for All Kinds of Readers. ReadHowYouWant offers the widest selection of on-demand, accessible format editions on the market today. Each edition has been optimized for maximum readability, using our patent-pending conversion technology. We are partnering with leading publishers around the globe to create accessible editions of their titles. Our goal is to have accessible editions simultaneously released with publishers new books so that all readers can have access to the books they want to read - today. To find more books in your format visit www.readhowyouwant.com
Download or read book Aristophanes the Cloak of Comedy written by Mario Telò and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-04-18 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Greek playwright Aristophanes (active 427–386 BCE) is often portrayed as the poet who brought stability, discipline, and sophistication to the rowdy theatrical genre of Old Comedy. In this groundbreaking book, situated within the affective turn in the humanities, Mario Telò explores a vital yet understudied question: how did this view of Aristophanes arise, and why did his popularity eventually eclipse that of his rivals? Telò boldly traces Aristophanes’s rise, ironically, to the defeat of his play Clouds at the Great Dionysia of 423 BCE. Close readings of his revised Clouds and other works, such as Wasps, uncover references to the earlier Clouds, presented by Aristophanes as his failed attempt to heal the audience, who are reflected in the plays as a kind of dysfunctional father. In this proto-canonical narrative of failure, grounded in the distinctive feelings of different comic modes, Aristophanic comedy becomes cast as a prestigious object, a soft, protective cloak meant to shield viewers from the debilitating effects of competitors’ comedies and restore a sense of paternal responsibility and authority. Associations between afflicted fathers and healing sons, between audience and poet, are shown to be at the center of the discourse that has shaped Aristophanes’s canonical dominance ever since.
Download or read book Knights written by Aristophanes and published by . This book was released on 1867 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Aristophanes The Complete Plays written by and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2005-02-01 with total page 738 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A brand-new translation of the world's greatest satirist. With a signature style that is at once bawdy and delicate, as well as a fearless penchant for lampooning the rich and powerful, Aristophanes remains arguably the finest satirist of all time. Collected here are all 11 of his surviving plays-newly translated by the distinguished poet and translator Paul Roche.
Download or read book Pericles on Stage written by Michael Vickers and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the eighteenth century, classical scholars have generally agreed that the Greek playwright Aristophanes did not as a matter of course write "political" plays. Yet, according to an anonymous Life of Aristophanes, when Dionysius the tyrant of Syracuse wanted to know about the government of Athens, Plato sent him a copy of Aristophanes' Clouds. In this boldly revisionist work, Michael Vickers convincingly argues that in his earlier plays, Aristophanes in fact commented on the day-to-day political concerns of Athenians. Vickers reads the first six of Aristophanes' eleven extant plays in a way that reveals the principal characters to be based in large part on Pericles and his ward Alcibiades. According to Vickers, the plays of Aristophanes—far from being nonpolitical—actually allow us to gauge the reaction of the Athenian public to the events that followed Pericles' death in 429 B.C., to the struggle for the political succession, and to the problems presented by Alcibiades' emergence as one of the most powerful figures in the state. This view of Aristophanes reaffirms the central role of allegory in his work and challenges all students of ancient Greece to rethink long-held assumptions about this important playwright.
Download or read book Philosophy Poetry and Power in Aristophanes s Birds written by Daniel Holmes and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2018-11-23 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aristophanes was clearly anxious about the role of the sophists and the “new” education in Athens. After the perceived failure of Clouds in 423 and its subsequent, unperformed revision, Aristophanes, this book argues, returned in 414 with Birds, a continuation and deepening of his critique found in Clouds. Peisetaerus or “persuader of his comrades,” the protagonist of Birds, though an old man, is clearly a student of Socrates’ phrontisterion. Unlike Socrates, however, he is political and ambitious and he understands the whole of human nature, both rational and irrational. Peisetaerus employs the various deconstructive techniques of Socrates and his allies (which is summed up on the comic sage in the image of “father-beating”) to overturn not just human society, but, with the help of his new allies, the divine and musical birds, the cosmos. After his new gods and bird city, Cloudcuckooland, are actually established, however, the hero re-introduces the “old” ways - justice, moderation, and obedience to law – but now under his personal authority, and thereby becomes “the highest of the gods.” Thus, the author postulates, in 414 Aristophanes has come to acknowledge the potency of the apparent civic-minded turn (or element) of the sophists, while aware of the self-aggrandizing nature of their ambition. Peisetaerus, unlike Socrates, is successful: he is establishing a just polis and cosmos and, therefore, must be victorious. But the consequence or cost of this success is illustrated through the Bird Chorus. After the polis is founded, the birds never again sing of their musical reciprocity with the Muses, the source of melodies for men. The birds are now political and the policemen of human beings. The sophist-run cosmos has lost its music. The new Zeus is an ugly bird-mutant. The gods and all nomoi have lost their beauty, honor, and reverential nature. Birds, in its finale, hilariously, but boldlyilluminates the inherent tension between philosophy (reason) and poetry (divinely-inspired tradition).