The Eleven Comedies, vol 1

The Eleven Comedies, by
Aristophanes et al

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Title: The Eleven Comedies
Author: Aristophanes et al
Release Date: August, 2005 [EBook #8688] [This file was first posted

on August 1, 2003]
Edition: 10
Language: English
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ELEVEN COMEDIES ***

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The Athenian Society
ARISTOPHANES
THE ELEVEN COMEDIES
Now For The First Time Literally And Completely Translated From
The Greek Tongue Into English
With Translator's Foreword An Introduction To Each Comedy And
Elucidatory Notes
The First Of Two Volumes
* * * * *
CONTENTS OF THE FIRST VOLUME
Translator's Foreword Authorities
THE KNIGHTS Introduction Text And Notes

THE ACHARNIANS Introduction Text And Notes
PEACE Introduction Text And Notes
LYSISTRATA Introduction Text And Notes
THE CLOUDS Introduction Text And Notes
INDEX
* * * * *
Translator's Foreword
Perhaps the first thing to strike us--paradoxical as it may sound to say
so--about the Athenian 'Old Comedy' is its modernness. Of its very
nature, satiric drama comes later than Epic and Lyric poetry, Tragedy
or History; Aristophanes follows Homer and Simonides, Sophocles and
Thucydides. Of its essence, it is free from many of the conventions and
restraining influences of earlier forms of literature, and enjoys much of
the liberty of choice of subject and licence of method that marks
present-day conditions of literary production both on and off the stage.
Its very existence presupposes a fuller and bolder intellectual life, a
more advanced and complex city civilization, a keener taste and livelier
faculty of comprehension in the people who appreciate it, than could
anywhere be found at an earlier epoch. Speaking broadly and generally,
the Aristophanic drama has more in common with modern ways of
looking at things, more in common with the conditions of the modern
stage, especially in certain directions--burlesque, extravaganza, musical
farce, and even 'pantomime,' than with the earlier and graver products
of the Greek mind.
The eleven plays, all that have come down to us out of a total of over
forty staged by our author in the course of his long career, deal with the
events of the day, the incidents and personages of contemporary
Athenian city life, playing freely over the surface of things familiar to
the audience and naturally provoking their interest and rousing their
prejudices, dealing with contemporary local gossip, contemporary art

and literature, and above all contemporary politics, domestic and
foreign. All this farrago of miscellaneous subjects is treated in a frank,
uncompromising spirit of criticism and satire, a spirit of broad fun,
side-splitting laughter and reckless high spirits. Whatever lends itself to
ridicule is instantly seized upon; odd, eccentric and degraded
personalities are caricatured, social foibles and vices pilloried,
pomposity and sententiousness in the verses of the poets, particularly
the tragedians, and most particularly in Euripides--the pet aversion and
constant butt of Aristophanes' satire--are parodied. All is fish that
comes to the Comic dramatists net, anything that will raise a laugh is
fair game.
"It is difficult to compare the Aristophanic Comedy to any one form of
modern literature, dramatic or other. It perhaps most resembles what
we now call burlesque; but it had also very much in it of broad farce
and comic opera, and something also (in the hits at the fashions and
follies of the day with which it abounded) of the modern pantomime.
But it was something more, and more important to the Athenian public
than any or all of these could have been. Almost always more or less
political, and sometimes intensely personal, and always with some
purpose more or less important underlying its wildest vagaries and
coarsest buffooneries, it supplied the place of the political journal, the
literary review, the popular caricature and the party pamphlet, of our
own times. It combined the attractions and influence of all these;