Birds Lysistrata Assembly Women Wealth

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.

In considering the practice and theory of translating Classical Greek plays into English from a theatrical perspective, Found in Translation, first published in 2006, also addresses the wider issues of transferring any piece of theatre from a source into a target language. The history of translating classical tragedy and comedy, here fully investigated, demonstrates how through the ages translators have, wittingly or unwittingly, appropriated Greek plays and made them reflect socio-political concerns of their own era. Chapters are devoted to topics including verse and prose, mask and non-verbal language, stage directions and subtext and translating the comic. Among the plays discussed as 'case studies' are Aeschylus' Agamemnon, Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus and Euripides' Medea and Alcestis. The book concludes with a consideration of the boundaries between 'translation' and 'adaptation', followed by an appendix of every translation of Greek tragedy and comedy into English from the 1550s to the present day.

In Aristophanes' Lysistrata, the women of Athens, fed up with the war against Sparta, go on a sex strike and barricade themselves into the acropolis to persuade their husbands to vote against the war. It is the most often performed of all Aristophanes' comedies. It is also, perhaps, the most misunderstood. This collection of essays by eight leading academics - written for sixth-form students and the general public alike - sets the play firmly in its historical and social context, while exploring Aristophanes' purpose in writing it and considering the responses of modern audiences and directors. The collection has been assembled and edited by David Stuttard, whose energetic new performing version of the play is included in this volume. Contributors include: Alan Beale; Edith Hall; Lorna Hardwick; James Morwood; Martin Revermann; James Robson; Alan H. Sommerstein; Michael Walton.

Aristophanes is the only surviving representative of Greek Old Comedy, the exuberant, satirical form of festival drama which flourished during the heyday of classical Athenian culture in the fifth century BC. His plays are characterized by extraordinary combinations of fantasy and satire,sophistication and vulgarity, formality and freedom. Birds is an escapist fantasy in which two dissatisfied Athenians, in defiance of men and gods, bring about a city of birds, the eponymous Cloudcuckooland. In Lysistrata the heroine of the play organizes a sex-strike and the wives of Athens occupythe Akropolis in an attempt to restore peace to the city. The main source of comedy in the Assembly-Women is a similar usurpation of male power as the women attempt to reform Athenian society along utopian-communist lines. Finally, Wealth is Aristophanes' last surviving comedy, in which Ploutos, thegod of wealth is cured of his blindness and the remarkable social consequences of his new discrimination are exemplified. This is the first complete verse translation of Aristophanes' comedies to appear for more than twenty-five years and makes freshly available one of the most remarkable comic playwrights in the entire Western tradition, complete with an illuminating introduction including play by play analysis anddetailed notes.

Examining every aspect of the culture from antiquity to the founding of Constantinople in the early Byzantine era, this thoroughly cross-referenced and fully indexed work is written by an international group of scholars. This Encyclopedia is derived from the more broadly focused Encyclopedia of Greece and the Hellenic Tradition, the highly praised two-volume work. Newly edited by Nigel Wilson, this single-volume reference provides a comprehensive and authoritative guide to the political, cultural, and social life of the people and to the places, ideas, periods, and events that defined ancient Greece.

This volume is the first edition with commentary since 1907 of Aristophanes' last surviving play, in which, as so often before, an audacious and imaginative hero finds a miraculous remedy for the all-too-real ills of the contemporary world in this case the concentration of wealth in the hands of those who don't deserve it at the expense of ...