Aristophanes 1 Clouds Wasps Birds

Presents translations of three satirical plays along with information on staging, history, religious practice, myths, and issues raised by each play.

Originally adapted for the stage, Peter Meineck's revised translations achieve a level of fidelity appropriate for classroom use while managing to preserve the wit and energy that led The New Yorker to judge his CloudsThe best Greek drama we've ever seen anywhere," and The Times Literary Supplement to describe his Wasps as "Hugely enjoyable and very, very funny. A general Introduction, introductions to the plays, and detailed notes on staging, history, religious practice and myth combine to make this a remarkably useful teaching text.

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).

Plato's philosophical dialogues can be seen as his creation of a new genre. Plato borrows from, as well as rejects, earlier and contemporary authors, and he is constantly in conversation with established genres, such as tragedy, comedy, lyric poetry, and rhetoric in a variety of ways. This intertextuality reinforces the relevance of material from other types of literary works, as well as a general knowledge of classical culture in Plato's time, and the political and moral environment that Plato addressed, when reading his dramatic dialogues. The authors of Philosophy as Drama show that any interpretation of these works must include the literary and narrative dimensions of each text, as much as serious the attention given to the progression of the argument in each piece. Each dialogue is read on its own merit, and critical comparisons of several dialogues explore the differences and likenesses between them on a dramatic as well as on a logical level. This collection of essays moves debates in Plato scholarship forward when it comes to understanding both particular aspects of Plato's dialogues and the approach itself. Containing 11 chapters of close readings of individual dialogues, with 2 chapters discussing specific themes running through them, such as music and sensuousness, pleasure, perception, and images, this book displays the range and diversity within Plato's corpus.

This line-for-line translation of Aristophanes' best-known comedy features an introduction on Old Comedy, and the place of Clouds and Aristophanic comedy within it. Footnotes and more detailed endnotes further distinguished this edition of a play famous for its caricature of Socrates and of the 'new learning'.

In recent decades, public higher education has faced perpetual crises. As states slash investment in postsecondary education and for-profit entities seek to supplant public colleges and universities, these public institutions have tried to compete by maximizing efficiency, namely, by downplaying and outsourcing the labor of teachers. Responsible Pedagogy makes a fresh case for the importance and value of public higher education and the work of teaching. In making this case, Eric Detweiler surveys the history of rhetoric and writing in postsecondary education, looking in particular at the teacher-student relationship. He finds that from the Socratic method to medieval exercises, from MOOCs to remote, asynchronous learning, the balance of authority and agency in the classroom is often precarious. But the problem goes deeper. Underlying both authority and agency is the value of mastery, which the teacher is to impart to the student. It is this emphasis on mastery, Detweiler argues, that distorts the proper relation between the student and teacher, a relationship in which they are responsible for and vulnerable to each other. Drawing on contemporary ethics, rhetorical theory, and critiques of practices in the online classroom, Detweiler develops a pedagogy of responsibility and shows how it can be applied in writing and communication curricula, assignments, and teacher-student interactions. Rehabilitating the proper role of the teacher, Responsible Pedagogy calls into question our newfound trust in educational technology and points the way to a better, more effective pedagogy.

A comedy of Aristophanes was in large measure a musical performance, and his lyric verse covers a wide range of styles - from popular song to parody of tragedy. The music is lost, and our only way of recovering something of the experience of an Athenian audience is by studying the rhythms of the poetry. This book provides a full text, with scansions, of the lyric of the surviving plays, and an introduction to the different rhythms used by Aristophanes, their origins, and literary associations. Dr Parker pays particular attention to the role played by lyric metre in the structure of the plays and to distinguishing the different levels of metrical style, thus illustrating the integral part metre plays in Aristophanes' dramatic art and satire. She also discusses fully the metrical aspects of textual problems in Aristophanes' lyric, and a section of the introduction traces the evolution of the study of Aristophanes' metres and the influence this has had on the text.