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
Sommerstein presents a freshly constituted text, with introduction and commentary, of Eumenides, the climactic play of the only surviving complete Greek tragic trilogy, the Oresteia of Aeschylus. Of all Athenian tragic dramas, Eumenides is most consciousl
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
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
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 (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
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
