“ Just as there is no loss of basic energy in the universe, so no thought or action is without its effects, present or ultimate, seen or unseen, felt or unfelt. ” ― Norman Cousins
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
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
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
Written in the fifth century B.C., Sophocles' tragedy concerns the shame and death of Ajax, a Greek who had won fame for his prodigious strength in the Trojan War. A brutal farewell to the valor and values of the heroic world, the play moves through a ser
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
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
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
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
