Clouds/Wasps/Birds (Aristophanes 1)

Four Plays: The Clouds/The Birds/Lysistrata/The Frogs

This volume brings together the four most acclaimed comedies of Greek playwright Aristophanes. The darker comedy of The Clouds satirizes Athenian philosophers - Socrates in particular - and reflects the uncertainties of a generation in which all tradition

The Complete Plays

A poet who hated an age of decadence, armed conflict, and departure from tradition, Aristophanes' comic genius influenced the political and social order of his own fifth-century Athens. But as Moses Hadas writes in his introduction to this volume, 'His tr

Lysistrata / The Acharnians / The Clouds

Lysistrata and Other Plays

Writing at the time of political and social crisis in Athens Aristophanes was an eloquent yet bawdy challenger to the demagogue and the sophist. The Achanians is a plea for peace set against the background of the long war with Sparta. In Lysistrata a band

The Birds and Other Plays

Offering a window into the world of ordinary Athenians, Aristophanes' The Birds and Other Plays is a timeless set of comedies, combining witty satire and raucous slapstick to wonderful effect. This Penguin Classics edition is translated from the Greek by

Three Plays: The Wasps / The Poet and the Women / The Frogs

In 'The Wasps' an old-fashioned father and his loose-living son come to blows--and end up in court; elsewhere Aristophanes milks the clash of generations for all it is worth by sending up the purveyors of new ideas like Socrates and Euripides (the most co

Peace

Aristophanes' Peace was performed at the City Dionysia in Athens in 421 B.C. as a decade-long war with Sparta seemed finally to be drawing to an end, and is one of only eleven extant plays by the greatest Old Comic poet. Olson's edition of the play, which

The Ecclesiazusae (or Women in Council)

The Ecclesiazusae (Women in Council) was not produced till 20 years after the preceding play, Thesmophoriazusae, at the Great Dionysia of 392 BCE, but is conveniently classed with it as being also largely levelled against females. "It is a broad, but very

Greek Tragedy

Agememnon is the first part of the Aeschylus's Orestian trilogy in which the leader of the Greek army returns from the Trojan war to be murdered by his treacherous wife Clytemnestra. In Sophocles' Oedipus Rex the king sets out to uncover the cause of the