(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). Clean and well thought out.ģ) 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.Ĥ) Frogs, which is mainly an argument between Aeschylus and Euripides about who's the best dramatist. (This is, depending on your translation, the first time dildos are mentioned in literature.)Ģ) The Birds, which I like to imagine animated in the Yellow Submarine style. The story is that Athenian women conspire with Spartans to deny sex to their husbands until they end the war. 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. But he makes a lot of fart jokes, too, and those are timeless.ġ) Lysistrata, by a long shot. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.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. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. The darker comedy of The Clouds satirizes Athenian philosophers, Socrates in particular, and reflects the uncertainties of a generation in which all traditional religious and ethical beliefs were being challenged.įor more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. In Lysistrata a band of women tap into the awesome power of sex in order to end a war. The Achanians is a plea for peace set against the background of the long war with Sparta.

Three plays by the comedian of Ancient Greece Writing at the time of political and social crisis in Athens, Aristophanes was an eloquent yet bawdy challenger to the demagogue and the sophist.

Aristophanes lysistrata and other plays