Some are even funny

Occasionally humourous, I think this edition would have benefited considerably from annotation to help the reader along and put everything in context. I'm sure at least four out of five jokes went right over my head!

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Some of the plays are difficult to imagine in production, but most are delightful reads. I have only seen Lysistrata produced, and it was hilarious. Aristophanes was a great master of satire

At the end of junior year in high school a number of us were taken on a field trip to the University of Chicago by, I think, Eric Edstrom, sponsor of my club, Tri-S (Social Science Society). At this point I had already had some contact with the university, having attended my first political demonstration there over a year before and having gone to a Phil Ochs concert on campus, not to mention innumerable visits to the Science and Industry Museum on its east end. The ersatz Gothic look and the wainscoted interiors were all very impressively collegiate. The students there seemed quite studious. The area bookstores were numerous. I imagined that a disproportionate fraction of them were Jewish which, to me, meant intellectual and that was a plus too. For some reason I've always very much wanted to please my father and marrying a leftist Jewish academic would, I was sure, meet with his approval, particularly if she led me along to a law degree and a career with the A.C.L.U.

In one of the area bookstores, perhaps the famous Coop, I picked up a used copy of Hadas' edition of Aristophanes' plays--a substantial paperback which seemed suited to the environment. I'd read Sophocles at this point and knew Aristophanes did comedy, but that was about it. While waiting for the group here and there I started perusing the thing, eyebrows raising. "Gosh, this is pornography!" I thought, somewhat embarrassed, somewhat excited, somewhat anxious to get home to get started.

I didn't go to Chicago. Instead I went to another school, Grinnell College, with a disproportionate fraction of Jews--and scholarly leftists too. I did, however, read all of Aristophanes--well, not the fragments (available from Loeb)--to discover he was not so much pornographic or erotic as bawdy, both scatologically and sexually.

Old Attic Comedy

A reread for me. Personally I could stay in the circle of Greek life and never leave. I hope others will enjoy them.

Reading Aristophanes, the father of comedy, is so much fun. He’s earthy to the point of crudeness, hilarious, and utterly human. I didn’t read the entirety of The Complete Plays of Aristophanes by I did read Birds, Clouds, Peace, and Frogs. It was the perfect selection to begin to encapsulate Aristophanes’ worldview as Frogs takes place in the underworld, Birds is a world created between Mount Olympus, home of the gods, and earth, while Peace is the story of one all-too-human hero who makes his way from earth to heaven (on the back of a dung beetle) in order to entreat the gods to end the wars that are ravishing Greece. Each play is unique in its own way and thoroughly entertaining. I would love to be able to time travel back to see the original productions of these works.

I'm doing a project where I'm discussing each of the surviving Greek plays in a Youtube video (at https://www.youtube.com/c/TheatreofPhil). I've completed my Aristophanes videos, which are linked at the end of each review below. My video about Aristophanes himself is at: https://youtu.be/ktdjsyJof1E.

Birds: This play is really a delight to read, even though much of it is difficult because a lot of the jokes rely on contemporary references to people or events. But the poetry is lively, with a great use of both end and internal rhyme--obviously, this version is in English translation, but from what the introduction said the author has tried to preserve Aristophanes' musical quality. In terms of the story, this is about a couple of Athenians who leave the city with its rules, regulations, and constant bickering over the legal system to try and find a utopian paradise. When they encounter a king who has transformed into a bird, they hit on the idea of a bird-city-state in the sky, which would exist between the earthly realm of humans and the Olympian realm of the gods, thus cutting off commerce between the two realms. They would starve the gods of sacrificial smoke, and end humanity's ability to call on the gods for help--and this position would allow the birds to take their "rightful" (according to the Athenian Pisthetaerus) place as the true rulers of existence. This plan works out remarkably well, though the city is repeatedly plagued by unwelcome guests either trying to swindle the birds in some way or trying to join them for opportunistic reasons.
https://youtu.be/WypMXjIemdg

Lysistrata: Perhaps the best known Greek comedy, Lysistrata is an excellent example of how cultural contexts matter for humor. The sexual innuendo and jokes about lust, penis size, blue balls, etc. still work for us today, but the deeper political satire that probably would have struck a 5th century BCE Athenian audience no longer plays. Aristophanes' original audience would have found it absurd that women could play a political role, taking over the acropolis, commandeering the treasury, dictating military decisions, etc. because in Athenian democracy women had no actual role. They were not citizens, could not speak in the assembly, could not sit on juries, could not own property, etc. So, the idea that a group of women could take over not just Athens but effectively all of Greece and assert their political will would be bizarre and potentially unsettling to Athenian men deeply invested in a stridently patriarchal culture.
https://youtu.be/gr8MrBrwHrg

Acharnians: A play about why peace is preferable over war, which was a fitting moral during the Peloponnesian War. Acharnians tells the story of a man named Dicaeopolis who gets tired of the war, which he believes was begun for foolish reasons anyway, and decides to sign his own peace treaty with the Spartans. So, Dicaeopolis gets peace, while the rest of the Athenians--primarily General Lamachus--still have to fight, and they don't get any of the benefits of Dicaeopolis' trade with the Megaran and Boeotian traders, both of whom come and trade pleasant commodities with Dicaeopolis. By the end of the play, the contrast is starkly illustrated when Lamachus is called back to war, where he gets injured, while Dicaeopolis has a lovely feast and two flute girls for company.
https://youtu.be/vOmcbG059-A

Knights: The introduction to this play says it is a play attacking Cleon, who came to power in Athens after Pericles died. And it definitely is that, as there are some clear references to Cleon, including a reference to the mask-makers refusal to make a mask resembling him. However, this also strikes me as a fundamentally anti-democratic play across the board, as much of the action revolved around the conflict between Paphlagon and the Sausageman over who can flatter, bribe, and lie to Demos most (a character named Demos, who also symbolically stands in for the citizenry of the Athenian polis). Neither Paphlagon nor the Sausageman deny this, in fact they repeatedly announce it as their strategy to win Demos over to their side, and Demos acknowledges that they're trying to trick him but that he will accept the gifts and services as long as it benefits him--which in fact is reminiscent of something Plato says in the Republic, about the demos being like a fickle young man who dallies with leaders until he gets bored with them.
https://youtu.be/7_XK1KEiD3k

Clouds: This is not one of my favorite Aristophanes plays, in large part because I tend to like to Sophists, which is the group this play largely attacks. Aristophanes is pretty conservative (which in ancient Athens meant he was skeptical of democracy and leaned more toward the old values of Homeric myth), and he opposed the new approach to education created by the Sophists--an approach based on rhetoric, which rejected the idea that truth is inherently more persuasive than untruth. In many ways, they were early postmodernists (which I also identify with). But basically, Clouds is about a man who wants to get out of the debts that his son has run up, so he decided to go to Socrates' school of Sophists (although Socrates was a bitter enemy of the Sophists, if Plato's account is accurate) and learn to persuade his creditors that he doesn't actually owe them any money. But the man is unable to retain the techniques, so he forces his son to go to the school. But when the son learns Sophistic rhetoric he turns it against his father to persuade the father that it's justified when his son beats him.
https://youtu.be/G_h_n8JtNQc

Wasps: Another anti-democratic play, Wasps centrally concerns the Athenians' love of trying legal cases. For most of us today, this isn't obviously anti-democratic because we don't really think of the judiciary as a principle arm of democracy, but for the Athenians it was. There was not a formal judicial apparatus with loads of precedent and set law and whathaveyou, cases were tried primarily on the basis of rhetoric and persuasion, where the defense and the prosecution would each make their case to a crowd of citizens, who would then vote on guilt or innocence--in other words, the process worked the same way that democratic decisions about military, economic, and other political matters were taken. In this play, not only does Bdelycleon persuade his father that judging for the state is wrong and slavish, Aristophanes also stages a satire of a court proceeding where one dog "sues" another for eating a block of cheese. It's a direct mockery of the Athenian judicial system that was such a central part of strengthening democratic and egalitarian principles like equality before the law, which were completely absent in most other parts of the ancient world.
https://youtu.be/-tBj67FwqgM

Peace: This play is really interested in things like farming, wine making, and feasting on hearty rustic fare--a prelude to the pastoral genre. The play tells of Trygaeus, who rides to Olympus on a giant flying dung beetle to find out why the gods are allowing so much war in Hellas. When he arrives, Hermes informs Trygaeus that War has buried Peace in the ground and the other gods have gone to the highest part of the sky so they won't have to bother with humanity. Trygaeus persuades Hermes to let him and the Chorus of farmers to dig Peace up, at which point she sends her two handmaids back to earth, one to be Trygaeus' bride (in a wedding that ends the play) and the other to go to the Attic council. Like Acharnians or Lysistrata, this is definitely an anti-war play, emphasizing the manifold benefits of peace over strife. Here, however, the focus is a rural one, claiming the benefits of things like farming, harvest festivals, delicious food, etc.
https://youtu.be/imgoqNsg4GA

Thesmophoriazusae: This is one of Aristophanes' more overtly metatheatrical/metadramatic plays, with Euripides as a main character. The women of the Thesmophora (a religious festival) decide to put Euripides on trial--or more accurately, decide how to punish him because they start from the assumption that he's guilty--for defaming the female gender, as well as for questioning the gods. Euripides finds out about this trial and sends his cousin Mnesilochus under cover as a woman to speak on his behalf. The scene where Euripides dresses Mnesilochus is one of the most striking metatheatrical moments because it is an act of costuming. Then when Mnesilochus inevitably gets caught, he tries to get Euripides to rescue him by playing various roles from Euripides' plays.
https://youtu.be/wpNkBBClTOo

Frogs: Another metatheatrical play, Frogs is about Dionysus' journey into the underworld to retrieve Euripides and bring the dramatist back to life to save the sanctity of tragedy. Interestingly, even the journey itself is metatheatrical, with several instances where Dionysus and his servant switch clothes alternately pretending to be Heracles. But the real metatheatre begins once Dionysus arrives in the underworld, where he learns that the greatest poet gets a special seat at Pluto's side, and that seat is contested between Aeschylus (who has held the seat since his death) and the recently deceased Euripides who now challenges for it. It's decided that Dionysus will judge a contest between the two to determine who is the better poet, and each dramatist makes his case for the superiority of his own work and the deficiency of the other. Euripides largely critiques Aeschylus' linguistic complexity and simplistic morality, while Aeschylus attacks his rival's low diction and promotion of immoral characters despite the consequent erosion of Athenian virtues. Euripides stands for truth, Aeschylus for virtue.
https://youtu.be/w7xN8EjGvBg

Ecclesiazusae: This late play is a rather tawdry and squalid affair compared to the wit and humor of many of Aristophanes' earlier plays. Much of the humor is rather low scatological or sexual humor, often leaving more of a bad taste than an admiration for Aristophanes' inventiveness. That being said, the play is interesting because of its comprehensive attack on democracy through the guise of women sneaking into the ekklesia (the citizen's government) and voting themselves complete power over the Athenian state, which they then turn into a kind of dystopian version of communism/a commune, where the main problem seems to center on young men being made to have sex with old, ugly women. However, Aristophanes' critiques of democracy are also more pointed than this because he attacks the decision-making of the ekklesia by having characters claim they must be drunk to pass some of the laws, or by pointing to quick changes in laws or how bad laws were enthusiastically adopted until it became clear how bad they were.
https://youtu.be/uLl7iXP7gZM

Plutus: The introduction in this edition claims this is the only surviving example of Middle Comedy, and it's definitely a departure from all of Aristophanes' other plays--to the point where one wouldn't really think it's an Aristophanes play. Plutus is the god of wealth, but he's been blinded by Zeus, which is why he so often bestows fortune on the corrupt and the unjust rather than the honest and just. But when Chremylos and his slave Cario (an early version of the wise slave figure who appears in New Comedy and Roman comedy) find the god they decide to restore his sight if he'll reward the honest and impoverish the corrupt. They decide to take Plutus to Asclepius' temple, but before they can go they debate Poverty who claims that she's the reason people work and produce the good everyone needs to live. This debate strikes me along the same lines as medieval allegories like Everyman, Mankind, or Wit and Science. Then when Plutus' sight is restored, he distributes wealth to the just and poverty to the wicked, and the remainder of the play is spent with good people coming to praise the god and bad people coming to complain. The other group that comes to complain are the gods, either in their own personages (Hermes comes) or through their priests, because people are no longer sacrificing to the gods to bring them wealth.
https://youtu.be/DT0Sm7-kB2o

Read:
KNIGHTS
CLOUDS
WASPS
BIRDS
LYSISTRATA
FROGS
A PARLIAMENT OF WOMEN - (Ecclesiazusae)

8:57:56
577 pages

100 pages- 1:39:02
200 pages- 3:12:51
300 pages- 4:51:35
400 pages- 6:19:21
500 pages- 7:50:10

You'll need this for theatre history.

Comedia pero no me rei?
wtf Aristocrata?
Por eso Hercules es mejor dramaturgo