Many years ago when I DJ'd at the worst club in Williamsburg a bummed out writer was in a conversation where he said, "Every literary agent in the world is less than scum." I started talking to him about life and comedy. At the time I was working back and forth with Ben as a comedy duo and he said, "So who's the Irishman and who's the Jew?"

Wow.

He had a book out at the time and he said that if I have any interest in comedy I needed to read Aristophanes. That was almost 3 years ago and I'm just now getting around to it...

Gouden ster. Een genot, een van mijn favoriete boeken thans.

1) Acharnians
2) Knights
3) Clouds
4) Wasps
5) Peace
6) Birds
7) Lysistrata
8) Thesmophoriazusae
9) Frogs
10) Ecclesiazusae
11) Plutus

I hate ass humor so Aristophanes and I were at odds from the first fart. The last in the litany of Greek playwrights I am reading through, my friend Matt best captured how I felt about most of these plays when he called them "bawdy." I admit to blushing. I admit to feeling prudish. I admit to several re-reading of lines followed by "Oh my god!" and then quick glancing around the apartment to see if anyone had caught me reading this. No one had. I live alone.

But getting past my nervous prudish ways, I also found myself constantly rethinking the plays from a modern day perspective. Several plays concern themselves with the evils of war, with specific jabs against war-hungry generals/politicians who are appear anti-peace because peace does not help them amass wealth or prestige - a theme I find in our present wars and past administration. In this way it's interesting to me how not difficult it was to imagine a modern version of these plays, or to relate to present day audiences (though the swinging phallus may have to go).

I am still working through three of the plays which present commentary on women in society. These I would love to see a modern feminist take on. They present complicated tropes: that women are more apt at promoting peace, even potentially more effective at governance, certainly adept at planning period. And whether presented in humor or not, these have the dual effect of commenting on men as a race and society which is itself useful. And yet at the same time, Aristophanes' women seem sex-crazed, manipulative, and present primarily for humor (the laughing at you kind), so that it is hard to take any commentary seriously, that is, if I can find what the commentary is meant to be.

Even though he's a dude who lived thousands of years ago, I still find Aristophanes funny. The one who's not that funny is the translator of this edition. I'm pretty sure I would've enjoyed Aristophanes's works and wisecracks more if the translator used language that is less arcane and formal in some aspects.

The plays were great, but some of the translations were awful. I'm not entirely sure who gets the credit for my rating, so I'll just split the difference.

The most offending translations, I think, were from Mosas Hadas (it's hard to remember since there were eleven plays by 4 different translators -- (Rogers, Webb, Hadas, & Lindsay)), but I think Hadas, the editor of my particular edition, was the worst offender. All of them attempted to translate in verse, which I appreciate, but that requires the translators to make broader interpretations, some of which were more successful than others. I should have taken notes while reading, but the most memorable example is from Hadas' translation of Clouds: "Chewing tobacco, revival meetings, chatauquas, Hoopskirts, fascinators, antimacassars!" I defy anyone to read that line and think, 'Ah, good old Ancient Greece.'

The real problem is that, while I will walk away with the general idea of the plays, I will have to reread each one (with different translators) if I actually want to get a sense of the real 5th & 4th century Greece, and any thoughts about Ancient Greece I might entertain now are potentially fraught with error. I resent that.

Lysistrata was cracking me up - those were some horny broads. It’s fun to read plays written in 400 BC with hilarious jokes such as, “you want to know who my husband is?… Well, now… you know the fellow right enough…. He’s the fellow from… er… Cocktown.”

Read Clouds, will read more in the future

What I appreciated most about this version of Aristophanes was the effort gone into the translation by Paul Roche. The Introduction briefly lays out Roche's difficulties in maintaining the subtilties from a polysyllabic language into one seldomly so. His attempt to faithfully translate the Greek results in a deliberate recreation of the assonance, consonance, alliteration and rhyme found in the original text. Roche's numerous footnotes help assure the reader that the spirit and content of the translation is faithful despite his use of modern colloquialisms (plus, I'm just a sucker for foonotes). For example, one of my favorite exchanges of this ancient Greek text...

_______

Cario, servant of Chremylus, confronting Plutus (the god of wealth) who is wandering blind and disguised:

CARIO: Look here,
are you going to let us know who you are
or must I use a little artificial stimulus?
Be quick about it,

PLUTUS: Go fuck yourself!

CARIO: [to CHREMYLUS:]: Did you gather who he said he is?

CHREMYLUS: He said it to you, not me,
and the way you approached him was rather rude and extremely
gauche.

[sidling up to PLUTUS all smiles:]

Good sir,
if straightforwardness and manners matter to you,
please tell us who you are.

PLUTUS: Fuck yourself-- you, too!
___________

A taste of Aristophanes comedic sensibilities, and a rather tame one at that. There's plenty of phallus pulling, ass jokes and other good-time crassness that even Andrew Dice Clay would consider good source material.

I never knew that 5th century Greece was such a bawdy place.


Other thoughts-

Ecclesiazusae (A Parliament of Women) a play about a communistic utopia that so acutley mirrors and parodies Plato's Republic that it calls into question the chronology of the ideas. The fact that the Republic would have to been published approximately 20 years after Aristophanes' play raises a chicken-or-the-egg situation. Did Plato build his philosophical ideas off of Aristophanes' comedy or were the issues such a common source of debate in 392 B.C. that both were responding to the current Athenian intellectual climate? An interesting question raised in the Oates & O'Neill edition and one to remember as I meander to Plato on the Great Books list.

Useful prayer before court...

HATECLEON, The Wasps:

O Lord Apollo, King, who's next my very door,
Deign to accept this novel ritual, King, for my father.
Cleanse the harshness and the hardness of his temper.
Sweeten his heart with the sweetness of a little honey
To deal with others more
Gently in everything,
And favor the accused rather than the accuser;
And let a tear drop for a pleader,
And abandon his bad temper
And draw the sting
Frin his anger.


*Note to self: get Athenian court waterclock as mentioned in The Wasps


In Lysistrata, is Aristophanes attempting to distance himself from Euripides' perceived misogyny (as mocked in his other plays) or is he simply laying the foundation to present Mnesilochus' mocking in Women at Thesmophoria Festival which was performed later in the same year 411 B.C?


If only Hitchcock could've done a version of Aristophanes' Birds.

Edit, November 5th 2024: I named my pet snake after him.


If a man who lived a few thousand years before I was born can make me find something funny, it should be given to him as credit. If a man who lived a few thousand years before I was born gives better feminist rep then many authors of this current age, it should be given to him as credit. If a man makes Hermes beg a slave for food as a joke, it should be given to him as credit.
That is to say, Aristophanes is lauded for a reason.
If you can somehow get through the fact that you are reading a translated version of a play written twenty five hundred years ago, which I had a hard time doing in the first two plays (Acharnians and Knights), you'll find Aristophanes to be an amazing comedic play writer.
As Plato said (I know he said it because it is written on the back of this book, and all words written on the back of a book are law): "The Graces, seeking an imperishable sanctuary, found the soul of Aristophanes."
My favorite play was Frogs. My least favorite one is Acharnians for the sole reason that I could not understand a word of it.

If you like poop and vagina jokes, but set in ancient Greece, this is the play for you!

Aristophanes is funny, sometimes outrageously so. In the Ecclesiazusae ("The Assemblywomen," a.k.a. "The Women of Parliament"), for example, a group of women sneak into the Athenian Assembly (Ecclesia) disguised as men and succeed in getting a measure passed that allows women to run the government. Men can sleep with any women they please as a part of this new regime, but they must sleep with an ugly women first. Aristophanes then plays this comic premise for all it's worth, and the result is hilarious.

As a classical Greek author, he is no less important than giants such as Sophocles, Thucydides or Plato. Many of his choral songs are among the most beautiful in Greek poetry. He is an extremely important source for a lot of information about Athenian daily life in the fifth century. War, politics, food, sex, litigation, literary criticism, and much else: you will find these subjects covered in detail in his plays. If you read him you will learn a lot more about the Greeks -- the Athenians in particular -- than you might otherwise acquire from schoolbook treatments.