Three different translators have brought these ancient Greek plays into language modern enough for us to easily grasp their meaning. Lysistrata is probably the most popular: who can resist a storyline like this? The women of Athens are fed up. All the men seem to do is go to war, no fun for anyone. Deciding on direct action, they call in the women of Sparta and the Peleponnese, and suggest that steadfast withdrawing of sexual favours unless the men negotiate a peace is definitely the way to go. Very funny. As is Aristophanes’ satire about Socrates, in The Clouds. Read them aloud to enjoy the verbal jousting.
-Alison

Just Read Lysistrata and found it not as funny as I'd hoped.

'we must give up the pleasure of - the prick.'
[women shudder and start to leave]

god i love aristophanes.

I should have read Thucydides' "History of the Peloponnesian War" before these comedies, as Aristophanes was writing during the thick of it and it would have probably added some useful context. Oh well; the plays were still enjoyable.

And another thing: the problem with reading comedic works translated from other languages, let alone those written over a millennia ago, is that much of it cannot be appreciated without spending every other line having the joke explained to you in the translator's notes. You'll be checking in a lot of time with the notes unless you're a scholar of Greek antiquity.

THAT SAID: These plays can still be appreciated. "The Clouds" is 50% fart jokes/50% making fun of Socrates, both timeless topics. "The Birds" is chock full of the same types of grifters that plague society today. "Lysistrata" repeated itself at the exact same time as I was reading it, through pure coincidence. And my favorite play of the bunch, "The Frogs", will be enjoyable to anyone who has read and enjoyed any of the famous Greek Tragedies. Aeschylus and Euripides crapping all over each other in Hades in an effort to get reincarnated to save the sorry state of literature was pretty hilarious.

Four well-written comedic plays. The 5 star rating is for the play “The Birds” which is 2500 years old and still laugh-out-loud funny. “Lysistrata,” a bit better known, is also very entertaining — an entire city of women deny their husbands sex until they stop the war they’re fighting. Some comedy really is timeless.

I don't always love Aristophanes; he can really cram the obscure contemporary references into his stuff, which makes it sortof impossible to get the jokes. But he makes a lot of fart jokes, too, and those are timeless.

In order, the best of these plays:

1) Lysistrata, by a long shot. The most original of Aristophanes' ideas, and the most timeless: as recently as 2012, feminists sarcastically suggested a Lysistrata when the Republicans accidentally launched an ill-fated war on birth control. The story is that Athenian women conspire with Spartans to deny sex to their husbands until they end the war. That idea is simple, funny and filthy. (This is, depending on your translation, the first time dildos are mentioned in literature.)

2) The Birds, which I like to imagine animated in the Yellow Submarine style. Clean and well thought out.

3) Clouds, relevant because it's about Socrates, whom we know, and because it includes the best of Aristophanes' fart jokes - which is saying something since, as noted above, Aristophanes really likes fart jokes.

4) Frogs, which is mainly an argument between Aeschylus and Euripides about who's the best dramatist. (The play up til that climactic confrontation, which describes Dionysos disguised as Herakles journeying to the underworld to find a great poet, is faintly amusing but largely forgettable.) Aristophanes leaves Sophocles out, claiming that he's too dignified to bother with the whole charade (although one has to imagine that, however sweetly it's explained away, his absence has to betray Aristophanes' judgment). This was a lot of fun for me - and it's getting the most time here because I'm reading it right now, and realizing as I do that I never really reviewed the rest of them; I've done my best to write capsule reviews of those, but they're not what I'm thinking of at this moment. Anyway, I can't see the attraction for anyone who isn't pretty invested in both Aeschylus and Euripides. It contains what amounts to scholarly comparison of the metres of both poets; at times it sounds like a grad thesis.

Aeschylus appears to come out the winner here, but it does seems like all the best lines go to Euripides. Maybe this is just my own prejudice coloring my interpretation; I like Aeschylus, but I like the enfant terrible, tricky and rebellious Euripides better. To me, Aeschylus comes out pretty stodgy.

Aeschylus: The poet should cover up scandal, and not let anyone see it.

Euripides: You ought to make the people talk like people!

This judgment by the Chorus seems about accurate:

One [Aeschylus] is a wrestler strong and tough;
quick the other one [Euripides], deft in defensive throws and the back-heel stuff.

And at the last, after Aeschylus has beaten Euripides, line for line, Dionysos says:

One of them's a great poet, I like the other one.

I'm going to go ahead and decide Aristophanes secretly agrees with me: Euripides is more fun. (Note: the text really doesn't support my conclusion.)

Aristophanes is aiming at, and concludes with, a more serious question for his time: should the politician Alcibiades be followed? Aeschylus says yes, Euripides says no. This is during the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Greece. Alcibiades, a politician with an amazing capacity for joining whichever side happened to be winning - he had switched from Athens to Sparta to Persia back to Athens - would soon be exiled after some disastrous naval losses. (And Athens will, y'know, lose this war.) Aristophanes didn't know this yet (if I have the dates right here), but Euripides was right.

Well, obviously I learned that Greek plays are easier to stay awake for than old Greek books, but that the chorus makes zero sense to me. And of course that if you withhold sex anything is possible.

Aristophanes never fails to please. If you think ancient plays will only be funny for people living in ancient times, then you are sorely mistaken. the same rules for humour apply, which means that comedy really is timeless. From the bawdy sexual protests of Lysistrata to the political dealings within the clouds, Aristophanes is a playwright that defined the comedic genre and it's easy to see why.

Love Aristophanes' plays but this edition could have used some formatting and spell checking.

I'm giving this 4 stars, not because I loved the book, but because I thought the edition was great, the notes very informative, the translation "true" in that you got the modern version of what the Greek might have been. As far as actual enjoyable reading, I'm not sure. I really liked The Clouds and I thought the exploration of sophistry was very astute. It felt true even now. The humor is a little out of reach for me (potty and sexual humor), but any different culture will have a different kind of humor, and we're talking about a different time and place here! I'm glad I got a sense of Greek comedy and a sense of the time period. It's a must-read for anyone reading classics, but beware!

*THE BIRDS only*

It's normally possible for me to read a translated work and at least try to forget the fact that I'm reading a piece of translation. In the case of this translation, however, almost every word drove the point home. That's not necessarily a bad thing, however; Arrowsmith's work calls attention to itself in a way that forced me to treat the text as more a scaffold for ideas than a piece of crafted language (he explains this in great detail - and with more eloquence than I can muster - in the introduction). As it turns out, those ideas are both profoundly interesting and mostly very funny. At some point, I should circle back and read the rest of these plays.

Frigging Hilarious. And taught me something about translation: if you translate a comedy and the result isn't comedic, you have failed. (Unless it wasn't funny in the first place, or you're writing for an audience of scholars.) Good translation evokes feelings similar to the ones that readers of the original text experience. If that means you have to take liberties with meaning, so be it.