Aristophanes: The Complete Plays

ARCHARNIANS KNIGHTS CLOUDS WASPS Aristophanes, the 5th and 4th century B.C.E. writer of Athenian Old Comedy, ranks, along with Shakespeare and Moli�re, as one of the three greatest writers of comedy the world has produced, and, like theirs, his plays are staples in the repertory of the world's major theaters. Like many of the greatest writers of comedy, Aristophanes turned to satire as a means of facing his fellow human beings (in his case Athenians) with the idiocies that they are capable of, especially in the area of politics. He wanted peace, an end to the Peloponnesian War, and so he created, among many others, a character, a little man, a farmer, who, tired of waiting for peace, negotiates a private peace between himself and the enemy. A woman, Lysistrata, stages a women's sex strike-no sex for their men till they end the war. In another play he has another little man fly up to Zeus on the back of a gigantic beetle to search out the goddess Peace and bring her back. Athens was coming apart, Athenians lived with the delusion that they were the invincible leaders of the world, and so, rather than end the war, they continue on, blind to the fact that they are doomed. Aristophanes took as his mission to warn them, and he did so with riotous humor, and they laughed, laughed hard, and kept on doing what they were doing, and Athens fell. We still laugh at those same characters because we see ourselves in them, and them in us, and we keep on doing what we're doing. This latest complete translation of the eleven plays of Aristophanes by Carl R. Mueller is a major attempt to bring the plays as close as possible to present day audiences and sensibilities. Racy language remains racy language and is treated, as in the original, with fearless abandon. Or to put it another way, Aristophanes is allowed to speak for himself without the censor waving his blue pencil in distress, intent on saving the souls of his congregation.