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| The Birds and Other Plays (Penguin Classics) | 
 enlarge | Author: Aristophanes
Creators: David Barrett, Alan Sommerstein
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Category: Book
List Price: $12.00
Buy New: $5.99
You Save: $6.01 (50%)
New (37) Used (15) from $5.99
Avg. Customer Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 87819
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 336
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.1
Dimensions (in): 7.7 x 5 x 0.6
ISBN: 0140449515
Dewey Decimal Number: 808
EAN: 9780140449518
ASIN: 0140449515
Publication Date: October 28, 2003
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
The plays in this volume all contain Aristophanes' trademark bawdy comedy and dazzling verbal agility. In "The Birds", two frustrated Athenians join the birds to build the utopian city of 'Much Cuckoo in the Clouds'. "The Knights" is a venomous satire on Cleon, a prominent Athenian demagogue, while "The Assembly Women" deals with the battle of the sexes as the women of Athens infiltrate the all-male Assembly in disguise. The lengthy conflict with Sparta is the subject of "Peace", inspired by the hope of a settlement in 421 BC, and "Wealth" reflects on the economic catastrophe that hit Athens after the war.
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| Customer Reviews:
A Review on Aristophanes' Plays April 1, 2001
8 out of 9 found this review helpful
Aristophanes is considered the finest comic playwrite of the Classical Era. This is certainly born out through the selection in this volume. Birds is a comedy about an Athenian who decides to incite the birds to take over the world and replace the classical deities as its rulers. Both Lysistrata and Assembly-Women are about what would happen if the women took over the government. In the former, the women of Greece band together in a sex-strike, to end the Pelopennesian Wars. In the later, the Athenian women use trickery to be elected the the leaders of the democracy, and they institute economic and sexual communism. In the last selection, Wealth, the deity of Wealth, Ploutos, is captured and made to distribute wealth only to the good. However, as Poverty points out, that might not be a good thing. These plays are full of topical comedy, but much of the humor still is funny 2400 years later. The translation is very uncensored, as Greek comedy itself was, so that very little is lost in metaphor. The imagery in some of them is highly amusing. Although this is a great example of the way life was in Classic Athens, these plays are not for the squeamish!!
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