The Complete Plays of Aristophanes

My puppet-show creating partner and I have been reading through several of these 2400-year old plays for source material for a new show. They are still quite entertaining after all this time. Aristophanes, like Shakespeare, can write great comic dialogue with lots of clever back-and-forth, usually in the first scene of his plays to warm up the audience. Then, he attacks the issue at hand, generally his problems with the Athenian government or with society in general. Whether he's inventing literary criticism (like in Frogs) or anti-war activism (like in Peace), he's able to do it with such amazing wit and cleverness live on stage in front of an audience he respects enough to understand what he's saying. If he were alive today, he'd probably be making the best and most beloved television and films that failed miserably with a broader audience.

While I have not read all the plays contained in the book, I thought I would start a review page and add each play's review as I go. Aristophanes (henceforth 'A') wrote what is called 'Old Comedy' in Ancient Greece. He lived at the time of Socrates. If you like modern day Monty-Python, you will like A. His comedy is very frequent in dialogue, often juvenile, and sex or 'potty' related. Greek plays usually have 'choruses' where a group of people would turn to the audience and sing, usually foreshadowing events to come or even making a speech to the audience or the judges on the playwright's behalf. Actors were always male even if the character was female, and wore masks. A's plays are usually of satire on prominent figures in Greece, such as Socrates himself in 'The Clouds'. Hero-type characters also walked on stilts, towering over the audience (this is important to know while you're reading A, or Shakespeare, that reading a play is only half the intended experience: it is supposed to be a PLAY, so while you read you must imagine the stage and the visual, auditory presentation, the actors moving back and forth speaking their lines, exiting stage, etc).

'The Frogs'
This play I thought was OK, perhaps 3 stars out of 5. The main plot is that the characters (a man and his slave - hilarious duo!) complain that all the great Greek poets have died, and they must go down to Hades and ask him in the Underworld if they can have one back (Euripides or Aeschylus). The first half of the play is great, traditional A comedy which is like a modern Monty-Python style. In this part the main characters get ready for the journey. The second half contains the descent into the Underworld where a lot of Frogs are singing, and a debate between Aeschylus and Euripides on who was the better playwright (ie. who should be chosen to return to Earth). This section the comedy drops a bit and (I imagine if staged) would be more a spectacle part of the play (singing, dancing, flashyness, etc). Overall 3/5, which is an averaged of 4/5 for first half and 2/5 of last half.

'The Clouds'
This play is good, 4/5 stars. It maintains A comedy throughout (note English versions today are heavily censored and reduce or eliminate many of the original sex and potty jokes). The main plot is the main character's son and wife have put the family in debt and the father wishes to learn from the Sophists, Socrates included, in order to manipulate the creditors into relieving their debts. The play is basically a 'roast' of Socrates, portraying him as an atheist, an odd fellow, and as part of the Sophists which he historically was not. There is also some discussion of whether Socrates' portrayal as a teacher and radicalizer of the young (which was true in many ways) contributed to his indictment and later execution via hemlock in his famous 'Trial' as described in Plato's Apology. Choruses speak to the audience, especially the judges to attempt to receive a higher judgement prize on the play (it ended up being awarded 3rd place). The most interesting dialogue in the play is the ubiquitous and timeless debate of ethics, how should I live: between the traditional/conservative old ways of virtue, chastity, honour, moderation, etc., and the new ways where often youth rebel from the old ways and wish to live life unlimited, riotous, and hedonistic. The irony is the father himself abandons traditional values by sending his son to learn manipulation, a dishonourable trait, and the son in-turn betrays his father, causing the father to return back to traditional values and find a way to repay his debts (honourably).

This book is very cool.

X-post with SG
Hadas’ translation of the extant Greek comedies is well put together. His meter is consistent and whimsical, and the intrinsic difficulty of making something so ancient feel so relevant is overcame. Much like Shakespeare’s comedies later, the biting wit is matched beat for beat with dick jokes and they are all pretty funny.

Favorite plays: “Lysistrata”, “Frogs”, and “Birds”
Having seen Lysistrata before helped put the action in context.
Least favorite: “Plutus”
The decline of Athens is matched in Aristophanes’ decline in quality.

Fart jokes of the ages.

Read Clouds.
This edition is atrociously bad. No line numbers, references to things that happened after Ancient Greece, and the "bottom stretched".

admittedly i've only read clouds, wasps and lysistrata from this and i have no desire to read anymore aristophanes ever again. i can appreciate the significance of his works and what they reveal about athens and greek culture but i just find that this kind of humour is insulting to my intelligence. not only does this kind of humour irritate me but it makes me sympathize with the aristocrats - what a nauseating person aristophanes seems to have been and really, if the demos loved this stuff, i would look down upon them as well.

and though i don't know anything about greek so cannot comment as to the accuracy of the translation or even the translator's intent, i don't like the style.

What I liked about it: The Birds, which is about two friends who get sick of living in Athens and convince a former king who now lives as a bird to build a whole bird city in the sky for them, is pretty good because it's not about arcane political machinations and you can imagine people today feeling the same. Lysistrata, which is about the women of Greece staging a sex strike in order to force an end to the Pelopennesian war, is also pretty funny, especially the scene where some of the ladies get horny and keep trying to make all these excuses for why they need to go home. Finally, Thesmophoriazusae or more easily pronounced The Parliament of Women, where the women go off to a festival by themselves. The playwright Euripides, worried they're talking about them behind his back, sends a friend in disguised as a woman to spy on them. Inside, he discovers a democracy, complete with voting, committees and action plans, debating how to punish Euripides for his negative portrayals of women in his plays. Of course the women quickly discover the cross-dresser and arrest him, only agreeing to release him when Euripides promises to stop treating them so horribly in his works.

What I didn't like about it: I read the Bantam Classics edition, which not only uses anachronistic words like hamburger, it also translates all the parts for foreigners into a weird form of Scots English. Not only that, it completely lacks footnotes, so when someone or something unfamiliar is mentioned, not that surprising in a 2000 year old book of plays, you either have to turn to Wikipedia to figure it out or just skip over that bit.

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