Produced by Jonathan Ingram, Thomas Berger, and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team.
The Athenian Society
Now For The First Time Literally And Completely Translated From The Greek
Tongue Into English
With Translator's Foreword An Introduction To Each Comedy And Elucidatory
Notes
The First Of Two Volumes
* * * * *
Translator's Foreword
Authorities
THE KNIGHTS
Introduction
Text And Notes
THE ACHARNIANS
Introduction
Text And Notes
PEACE
Introduction
Text And Notes
LYSISTRATA
Introduction
Text And Notes
THE CLOUDS
Introduction
Text And Notes
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Translator's Foreword
Perhaps the first thing to strike us—paradoxical as it may sound to sayso—about the Athenian 'Old Comedy' is its modernness. Of its verynature, satiric drama comes later than Epic and Lyric poetry, Tragedy orHistory; Aristophanes follows Homer and Simonides, Sophocles andThucydides. Of its essence, it is free from many of the conventions andrestraining influences of earlier forms of literature, and enjoys much ofthe liberty of choice of subject and licence of method that markspresent-day conditions of literary production both on and off the stage.Its very existence presupposes a fuller and bolder intellectual life, amore advanced and complex city civilization, a keener taste and livelierfaculty of comprehension in the people who appreciate it, than couldanywhere be found at an earlier epoch. Speaking broadly and generally,the Aristophanic drama has more in common with modern ways of looking atthings, more in common with the conditions of the modern stage,especially in certain directions—burlesque, extravaganza, musical farce,and even 'pantomime,' than with the earlier and graver products of theGreek mind.
The eleven plays, all that have come down to us out of a total of overforty staged by our author in the course of his long career, deal withthe events of the day, the incidents and personages of contemporaryAthenian city life, playing freely over the surface of things familiar tothe audience and naturally provoking their interest and rousing theirprejudices, dealing with contemporary local gossip, contemporary art andliterature, and above all contemporary politics, domestic and foreign.All this farrago of miscellaneous subjects is treated in a frank,uncompromising spirit of criticism and satire, a spirit of broad fun,side-splitting laughter and reckless high spirits. Whatever lends itselfto ridicule is instantly seized upon; odd, eccentric and degradedpersonalities are caricatured, social foibles and vices pilloried,pomposity and sententiousness in the verses of the poets, particularlythe tragedians, and most particularly in Euripides—the pet aversion andconstant butt of Aristophanes' satire—are parodied. All is fish thatcomes to the Comic dramatists net, anything that will raise a laugh isfair game.
"It is difficult to compare the Aristophanic Comedy to any one form ofmodern literature, dramatic or other. It perhaps most resembles what wenow call burlesque; but it had also very much in it of broa