  | ||
|
|
Notable Playwrights Aristophanes Born: Athens, Greece; c. 450 B.C.E. Died: Athens, Greece; c. 385 B.C.E. Principal Drama Acharnēs, 425 B.C.E. (The Acharnians, 1812); Hippēs, 424 B.C.E. (The Knights, 1812); Nephelai, 423 B.C.E. (The Clouds, 1708); Sphēkes, 422 B.C.E. (The Wasps, 1812); Eirēnē, 421 B.C.E. (Peace, 1837); Ornithes, 414 B.C.E. (The Birds, 1824); Lysistratē, 411 B.C.E. (Lysistrata, 1837); Thesmophoriazousai, 411 B.C.E. (Thesmophoriazusae, 1837); Batrachoi, 405 B.C.E. (The Frogs, 1780); Ekklesiazousai, 392 B.C.E.? (Ecclesiazusae, 1837); Ploutos, 388 B.C.E. (Plutus, 1651) Other Literary Forms Aristophanes is remembered only for his plays. Achievements Because the plays of his contemporaries and rivals have all been lost, it is impossible to credit Aristophanes with specific innovations in the development of Greek comedy. In his eleven surviving plays, however, one can trace an evolution in his own work. Although this evolution corresponds to a broader trend (the movement from Old Comedy to Middle and New Comedy), which in turn was influenced by changes in political and social conditions, Aristophanes' own development as an artist undoubtedly influenced such larger developments as much as it was shaped by them. Aristophanes was recognized as a great comic poet in his lifetime, winning many first prizes in dramatic competitions and almost never taking less than second prize. His first two plays have been lost, but his third, The Acharnians, displays an early mastery of comic technique and a profound unity of theme. Only later did Aristophanes develop unity of action; it was clearly not expected of Old Comedy, which had grown out of two or more heterogeneous elements (including the animal chorus and primitive forms of farce). Indeed, the unity of plot to be discerned in Aristophanes' later comedies (Lysistrata, Ecclesiazusae, and Plutus) is to some extent a compensation for the loss of certain features of the early plays--notably the freedom of the chorus to engage in wild ad hominem attacks and unbridled political satire. The outstanding features of Aristophanes' art are the audacity of his comic metaphors and the beauty of his choral lyrics. These are best displayed in his early and middle plays, as well as in The Frogs, a brilliant post mortem on Greek tragedy and the culture of imperial Athens (the Athenian defeat, marking the end of the Peloponnesian War, was imminent when the play was produced). Though Aristophanes survived his city's defeat and continued to develop as an artist, the postwar plays betray a certain weariness, a flagging of comic invention, corresponding to the political and cultural exhaustion of Athens in the early fourth century B.C.E. Perhaps the greatest single achievement of Aristophanes is the fact that his are the only plays of the Old Comedy to have survived--a tribute, surely, to his superb comic craftsmanship. Biography Very little is known of Aristophanes' life; most of what is known has been gleaned from his plays and is therefore vague or uncertain because of the comic content. The only evidence for his birthdate is the fact that he was "very young" when his first play was produced in 427 B.C.E. His first three plays were produced by another man, but it is not known whether this was because of a legal age limit, Aristophanes' inexperience, or simple preference (some of his later plays were also produced by others). He belonged to the deme (township) of Kudathenaion, and his father's name was Philippos. Nothing is known, however, of the family's social or economic status. A line in The Acharnians has been interpreted to mean that he or his father had land holdings on the island of Aegina, but these may have been acquired during the distribution of Aeginetan land to Athenian citizens after the expulsion of the islanders in 431. According to the scholiasts, the poet was indicted several times by the demagogue Cleon--whom he attacked in several plays--for usurping citizenship rights and for holding Athens up to ridicule before foreign visitors (the latter charge stemmed from his lost play The Babylonians, produced in 426, which portrayed the subject-allies of Athens as Babylonian slaves). Apparently Cleon was unable to make either charge stick, and Aristophanes returned to the attack. The Knights, presented in 424 (and which won a first place), portrays Cleon as a venal slave who flatters and cheats his master Demos ("the people" personified). The popularity of the play did not, however, have any effect on Cleon's popularity: A few weeks after it won first prize, Cleon was chosen as one of the city's ten generals for the following year. From the lists of victors in the dramatic festivals, it can be inferred that Aristophanes was a prolific and popular playwright. The Alexandrian scholars of the third and second centuries B.C.E. knew of forty-four plays attributed to him, forty of which they considered genuine. According to an early fourth century B.C.E. inscription, he also held public office (as prytanis, one of the presiding members of the Boulē, the council that set the agenda for the legislative assembly). His last datable play is the Plutus, staged in 388; two other plays were staged, perhaps posthumously, by his son Araros. All three of Aristophanes' sons tried their hand at writing comedies, but their works have not survived. There is one further piece of biographical evidence: the vivid portrait of Aristophanes drawn by Plato in his dialogue the Symposion (388-368 B.C.E.; Symposium, 1701). As a character in the dialogue, Aristophanes delivers a brilliantly witty speech on the origin of erotic love, which he traces to the "globular" condition of the first mortals. These globular humans had two heads, four arms, and four legs apiece, and were so powerful that the gods felt threatened by them, so Zeus cut each one in half. Sexual love is thus the attraction between "halves" of formerly whole beings. What lovers really seek is indissoluble union with their other halves. This speech cannot be attributed to the historical Aristophanes. Plato was a great stylist and could easily have invented the whole. Yet the comic myth is akin to those found in Aristophanes' plays, and it sheds an interesting light on the relationship between the comic dramatist and the philosopher Socrates, whom Aristophanes satirized (unfairly, many scholars feel) in his play The Clouds. Socrates is also a character in the Symposium, and his speech, which follows and rebuts that of Aristophanes, reveals the irreducible opposition between the two men's views of the human condition. As scholar David Grene has put it, what Aristophanes most objected to in Socrates' teaching was the idea that philosophical investigation superseded all other claims on people's attention and energy, including the pleasures of food, sex, and poetry. These pleasures, together with that of competition, which Plato also deplored, are central to Aristophanes' comic vision. Analysis Because Aristophanes has had no real literary heirs, or imitators, in subsequent European literature, some discussion of Old Comedy as a genre is in order. There are good reasons why this genre died out when Athens went into its decline and was never revived. Old Comedy was nurtured and sustained by a constellation of social and political features of imperial Athens, which never came together in quite the same way subsequently. The fifth century B.C.E. saw the height of Athenian fortunes, and the sense of limitless possibility that the times inspired is reflected in Aristophanes' early plays. Athenian democracy was also at its height. It was a limited democracy, insofar as citizenship was limited, but a direct democracy in which the citizens themselves voted on every proposed law and treaty. There were obvious analogies between the legislative assembly, the popular courts (where juries numbered in the hundreds, sometimes in the thousands), and the theater, where the people assembled in a body on a few festival days each year to see productions subsidized by state taxes. The no-holds-barred approach prevailing in assembly and court debate spilled over into the comedies, which are filled with ad hominem attacks on individuals. Politicians and poets were favorite targets, but a man might be singled out for ridicule because of his appearance, his cowardice in battle, or even his sexual proclivities. Two unique features of Old Comedy reflect its political and social setting with special vividness. These are the agon and the parabasis. The agon is a contest, partly physical but chiefly verbal, between the protagonist and the chorus. Its rhetoric reflects that of the assembly and law courts (and of Greek tragedy as well, which had a similar relationship to its social and political milieu). The parabasis is an address to the audience in which the comic chorus drops whatever dramatic identity the play imposes on it to speak in the first person, in the poet's own voice. The parabasis may be only tangentially related to the plot and can address any political or social issue, although always in a fantastic vein that must have blunted its political impact. Scholars disagree considerably on the question of Aristophanes' political purpose and beliefs, though most see him as in some sense conservative--that is, supportive of moderate (as opposed to radical) democracy and of the "traditional" virtues proper to an agrarian, nonimperial economy: peace, political stability, and free trade. It is difficult, though, to elicit any specific political program from the plays, because of their essentially anarchic spirit, which tends to subvert the few sober pronouncements of individual characters. Even if it could be demonstrated from the plays that Aristophanes had such a program, the question of its impact would remain. Here again evidence is slight and ambiguous. There is no known case in which a comedy demonstrably influenced public policy. Aristophanes produced a whole series of brilliant antiwar plays during the course of the Peloponnesian War (some took first prize), but the war continued. Even the Peace of 421, staged the same year the Peace of Nicias between Athens and Sparta was concluded, seems more a reflection of the city's mood than a peace initiative on Aristophanes' part. The attack on Socrates in The Clouds is cited by Plato in the Apologia Sōkratous (399-390 B.C.E.; Apology, 1675; which purports to be Socrates' own defense at his trial) as a source of popular hostility against the philosopher, but The Clouds preceded the trial by twenty-five years. What is more, to judge from the Symposium, Aristophanes and Socrates belonged to the same circle of friends; surely the poet had no intention of urging any action against the philosopher. Scholar K. J. Dover has pointed out that Aristophanes survived the advent of oligarchic regimes as well as the democratic backlash that accompanied their overthrow; this would hardly have been possible had he been perceived as a partisan of either. A careful reading of his plays will reveal that they take advantage precisely of the freedom from responsibility that Old Comedy permits to create a world of fantasy and wish-fulfillment. Though Aristophanes addresses real political issues, the solutions he offers are not political but poetic ones. The Acharnians The Acharnians, Aristophanes' earliest surviving play, deserves close consideration not only because of its intrinsic merit but also because it exemplifies two strands that run throughout his work: a celebration of the joys of peace (with its corollary, an attack on the evils of war) and a fantasy of limitless possibility for the protagonist. These two strands are intimately interwoven, for the "pacifism" of Aristophanes is by no means the selfless and idealistic stance evoked by that word in modern times. His heroes hate war not because it entails the shedding of blood but because it results in a dearth of good things: food, wine, sex, and the freedom to do what one pleases and go where one pleases. Therefore, Dikaiopolis, the hero of The Acharnians, after trying in vain to raise the issue of peace negotiations in the assembly, makes his own private treaty with Sparta and proceeds to enjoy the benefits: freedom to celebrate the rural Dionysia, to trade with former enemies for imported delicacies, and to stay at home and feast while General Lamachos goes off to battle with his rations of salt fish and onions. The agon in this play is a debate between Dikaiopolis and a chorus of Acharnian charcoal-burners (from Acharnai, one of the demes of Attica), who hate the Spartans for ravaging their lands and can think of nothing but revenge. Dikaiopolis wins them over with a comic version of the war's causes (a parody of Herodotus's account of the reasons for enmity between Greece and Asia Minor) and a reminder that poor men have the least to gain from war. Like many of Aristophanes' heroes, Dikaiopolis is a "little man" of middle age or older whose triumph over the powers that be is symbolized by his rejuvenation or restored sexual potency at the end of the play. As Lamachos returns wounded from battle, Dikaiopolis returns drunk from the feast, ready for a night of lovemaking with two courtesans. Yet this play is hardly a straightforward plea for the "little man," for once he has his treaty, Dikaiopolis refuses to extend it to include another farmer whose two oxen have been seized by the enemy. The consistency of the play lies in its imagery. On the level of dramatic action, each Aristophanic comedy is built on one or more controlling images that assume a life of their own; in the choral odes, these and other images appear in a "crystallized" form. (In Old Comedy, as in Greek tragedy, the choral poetry provides a kind of lyric reflection on the action it interrupts.) In The Acharnians, the central comic image is that of wine, which becomes a metaphor for peace thanks to a pun: The Greek for "truce" is spondai, literally the "libations" that accompanied ratification of treaties. Dikaiopolis is offered three kinds of spondai by the Spartans and picks the best "vintage"--that is, the longest truce. The image is appropriate in other ways as well, for peace was associated with the euphoria of drunkenness and the freedom to celebrate festivals (many of which were curtailed during the war). At the play's end, Dikaiopolis is proclaimed the winner in a drinking contest--a standard feature of the Lenaia, the festival at which the play was produced--and his victory is made to suggest (before the fact) the poet's own victory in the dramatic contest. It should be obvious that such "pacifism" as the play contains is fully compatible with the most vigorous forms of competition; within the comic universe of his plays, Aristophanes loves a good fight as much as anyone. Nor would his Greek audience have perceived this as a paradox: There was a traditional distinction, going back at least to Hesiod's Erga kai Emerai (c. 700 B.C.E.; Works and Days, 1618), between useful and destructive eris, "strife." Only the latter was considered hateful; rivalry and emulation were encouraged as the means to excellence and prosperity. Peace This preoccupation with competition is visible, though somewhat more restrained, in the two other extant antiwar plays of Aristophanes. Peace is unusual in that it has no agon; instead, the members of the chorus, farmers from all the city-states, are made to "pull together" (literally and figuratively) as they raise the goddess Peace from the pit to which War has consigned her. Exhumation is only one of a constellation of images presiding over the action of this most earthy play, which opens with two slaves kneading cakes of excrement to feed a giant dung-beetle. The play's hero, Trygaios, mounts the beetle and flies to heaven, where he finds War preparing to pound the Greek cities in a mortar. No pestle is available, however (both the Athenian and the Spartan commanders in chief, Cleon and Brasidas, having recently died), and Trygaios takes advantage of the circumstance to unearth Peace, whose acolyte Opora (Harvest) he then weds. His flight to heaven notwithstanding, Trygaios has less of the entrepreneur about him than does Dikaiopolis. He is willing to share his good fortune with all who desire peace, and he even presents the goddess's other acolyte, Theoria (Ceremony), to the Council as a gift. Lysistrata In his generosity, Trygaios anticipates Lysistrata, heroine of the play that bears her name. Though she leads the women of Greece in a successful coup that leaves them in possession of the Acropolis (and the Athenian treasury), her only aim is to induce the men to make peace; she keeps nothing for herself. The motif of competition recurs in the "battle of the sexes" she so cunningly orchestrates. The agon of Lysistrata involves two semi-choruses, one of old men and one of old women, who at first shower one another with abuse but are eventually reconciled, forming a single chorus. The attack on the Acropolis that the old men stage, complete with battering rams and torches, is an obvious sexual metaphor. True to their oath to resist their husbands' advances, the women repulse the attack and douse the torches. Yet once the men have signed a treaty ending the war, they are admitted for a banquet, and each goes home with his own wife, in a mass version of the "wedding" that so often closes Aristophanes' plays. Frequently in Aristophanes, and notably in Trygaios's address to the Council as he presents them with Theoria, the sexual act itself is described as a struggle, yet another form of contention. That it is an example of "good" strife should be obvious because it is also a form of union, and indeed, Trygaios compares it to various events in the athletic contests, which were among the few truly Panhellenic institutions of the fifth century B.C.E. Despite these points of comparison, the three antiwar plays differ from one another in important ways, as might be expected from their dates of production. The Acharnians, fairly early in the war, allows its hero greater selfishness and irresponsibility than does either of the later plays; the mood of Peace, staged in 421 when peace seemed imminent, is more euphoric than that of Lysistrata in 411. There is even a note of pathos in Lysistrata's plea for the women left widowed and unmarried by the ongoing war, in which they have no say. The fantasy of unlimited possibility, reflected in Dikaiopolis's private treaty and Trygaios's flight to heaven, has disappeared from the latter play. Its fullest development was reached not in the war plays but in The Knights, and especially The Birds. The Knights The Knights and The Birds are quintessentially Athenian celebrations of a quality that only the Athenians (and not all of them at that) considered a virtue: polupragmosunē, "doing-muchness," or "having a finger in every pie." The Knights is an attack on the demagogue Cleon, whom Aristophanes accuses of pandering to the people's whims for his own profit. Cleon is defeated and replaced in the course of the play (which is one protracted agon) by a man who outdoes him in pandering--a Sausage-Seller, whose qualifications for the role of demagogue are low birth, an ear-splitting voice, and the ways of the streetwise. Cleon and the Sausage-Seller compete to satisfy the appetite of Demos, "the people" personified. Although ostensibly Demos's slaves, the two panderers hold the purse strings, and what finally recommends the Sausage-Seller to Demos is the fact that he holds nothing back for himself. At the play's end, the Sausage-Seller rejuvenates his master (by "cooking" him, as Medea promised to do for the aged King Pelias), bringing back the sober and responsible Demos of the Persian War era. This miracle, however, lacks the dramatic power of his unrestrained pandering contest with Cleon. To judge from the parabasis, the poet's nostalgia is not so much for the sobriety of the old Athens as for its unchallenged supremacy. The Birds Aristophanes' ultimate power-fantasy is The Birds. Two Athenians, Pisthetairos and Euelpides, leave their city and go to live with the birds, because, they say, Athens has become unlivable. They proceed to found a new city in the sky (Nephelokokkugia, or "Cloudcuckooland"), which outdoes even imperial Athens in polupragmosunē. With the birds' help, they build a wall between heaven and earth that keeps the smoke of burnt offerings from reaching the gods; reduced to starvation, the gods are forced to yield Basileia, a female personification of kingship, to Pisthetairos. The controlling metaphor in this play is flight, which confers not only freedom from the ordinary constraints of the human condition but also vast power--the power of one who surveys the world from a great height, the better to administer it. It is the divine power of Zeus, in short, for Pisthetairos is not content merely to become a bird; he must become a god and king of the gods. The Birds is the most fully realized of Aristophanes' power-fantasies, both in its dramatic coherence and in the beauty of its lyrics. It is also the one that leaves the "real world" most completely behind. Regardless of whether Aristophanes intended it as a commentary on the Sicilian expedition (which had been launched the previous year), it conveys perfectly the boundless Athenian audacity behind the expedition. The Clouds The Clouds, although a relatively early play, deserves to be considered with the later plays for several reasons. In the first place, it ends not with the apotheosis of the hero but with an act of violence bred of his frustration. At the same time, it places greater emphasis on the portrayal and interaction of the characters, a trait associated with the later plays (The Frogs, Ecclesiazusae, Plutus). The text of The Clouds that has survived is unfortunately not the text that was staged; it is a revision, though an incomplete one. In the revised parabasis, Aristophanes claims that he considers The Clouds his best play to date; he insists particularly on its subtlety and originality. Scholar Grene has suggested that he is referring to "the psychological study of human personality," which looms larger in this than in the other early plays. Though it lacks consistency and dramatic unity (perhaps because of the incomplete revision), the play features an unusually realistic hero--indeed, a sort of antihero. His name is Strepsiades (which means, roughly, "Twister"), and he is of humble country stock, like Dikaiopolis and Trygaios; unlike them, however, he is genuinely corrupt. In order to get out of paying the debts his son has incurred, Strepsiades enrolls at the Thinkery, presided over by Socrates, who is here made to represent all the dubious achievements of the "new learning" (the sophistic movement of the fifth century B.C.E.). Strepsiades himself is too thick-witted to learn what Socrates has to teach, however, so he persuades his son Pheidippides to take the course--and thereby gets his comeuppance, for Pheidippides uses the specious reasoning he learns to justify not only defaulting on debts but also beating his parents. Strepsiades gets his revenge--by burning down the Thinkery, an act of desperation, not an assertion of comic possibility like Dikaiopolis's truce or the Sausage-Seller's trouncing of Cleon. In this play, Aristophanes came to grips with a knotty problem that has not lost its contemporary flavor: the interaction of character and values in the educational process. Perhaps because of this very complexity, the resolution, as it stands, lacks the comic release of most of Aristophanes' finales. Ecclesiazusae In this respect, The Clouds resembles Ecclesiazusae, one of Aristophanes' two surviving fourth century B.C.E. plays. Though it lacks the wit and subtlety of The Clouds, Ecclesiazusae shares its realistic, not to say pessimistic, perspective. Ecclesiazusae is also a kind of anti-Lysistrata, for it sets up a utopia under the leadership of women but then severely undercuts it by dramatizing the chaos that results. The women's edicts are either unenforceable (when ordered to surrender their goods to the community, some citizens simply withhold them) or profoundly unnatural (the young and beautiful are forced to gratify the sexual desires of the old and ugly). The sense of realism and disenchantment is strengthened by a drastic reduction in the role of the chorus (resulting in a dearth of lyric passages) and by a more concentrated plot. The old Aristophanes can be detected, though, in the antiphilosophical stances of the play. Though the idea of pooling goods and sexual partners is attributed to the heroine, Praxagora, it is likely to have been the brainchild of a sophist or philosopher. Plato was its most famous exponent, but his Politeia (388-368 B.C.E.; Republic, 1701) came later (unless an early version of it was already in circulation in 392). Whatever its source, the idea belongs, in Aristophanes' view, to that class of abstractions ridiculed in The Clouds for the discomfort they cause to all but the few clever enough to manipulate them. It has been suggested that in contrast with the early plays, in which the old heroes are rejuvenated and the clock turned back to a more vigorous age, the late plays merely complete the work of destruction already in progress. According to this view, the rule of women is symbolic of the dissolution of the polity and the victory of the private over the political sphere. It is certain that politics disappeared entirely from New Comedy, the forerunner of the romance and of most modern comedy, in which the private sphere fills the foreground. The Frogs The Frogs is the last surviving work of Old Comedy and perhaps the greatest. It was produced in 405, shortly after the deaths of Sophocles and Euripides and just before the Athenian defeat at Aegospotami, which ended the Peloponnesian War. The hero is Dionysus, divine patron of the theater, who undertakes a trip to Hades because he can find no good tragedians aboveground. His idea is to bring back Euripides, but once below, he finds himself called on to judge between Euripides and Aeschylus, who are contending for the "chair of tragedy." In the end, Dionysus declares Aeschylus the winner and brings him back to Athens. There are two choruses: one of frogs, who engage in a shouting match with Dionysus as he rows across the Stygian lake in Charon's boat, and one of Initiates to the Eleusinian Mysteries, whose life in the underworld is a joyous one of choral song and torchlight revels. The Initiates represent a kind of ideal community, warning away all who would engage in sedition or accept bribes, but they are also a true comic chorus, full of insults and bawdy jokes. This harmonizes perfectly with their dramatic identity as initiates, for the mysteries blended fertility cult with eschatological promises, and the ceremonies included the hurling of bawdy taunts. The agon consists of the dramatic contest between the two tragedians, including hilarious parodies of each man's style and culminating in the actual weighing of their verses on a scale. Much has been made of the fact that Dionysus bases his final decision on the two men's political advice to the city. As in the finale of The Knights, however, the emphasis is not so much on the actual content of the advice as on the evocation of a time--that of Aeschylus's prime--when Athens was the unchallenged leader of Greece. Despite the play's premise, that the best poets are all in Hades, there is surprisingly little black comedy. The choral lyrics radiate hope (albeit an eschatological hope), and the spirit of emulation proper to Aristophanes' early plays enlivens The Frogs from first to last. In addition to the agon proper, there is not only a shouting match between Dionysus and the frogs but also a whipping contest between Dionysus and his slave Xanthias (to determine which of them is the god). Aristophanes is aware, as always, of the dramatic competition in which he is himself a contestant and pulls out all the stops--just as he depicts Aeschylus and Euripides doing--in order to win. At the same time, however, there is a poignant emphasis on the need for reconciliation among the city's various factions if Athens is to survive. Therefore, the parabasis, sung by the chorus of Initiates, pleads not for Aristophanes' victory but for a general amnesty permitting exiled citizens to return. Though Aristophanes delights in competition to the very end, he recognizes that if the terms of competition are not adhered to, the city cannot stand. For later readers of The Frogs, the play's poignancy is increased by hindsight: Athens did fall, never to regain the eminence it enjoyed in Aeschylus's day. The fact that he chose Initiates for his chorus suggests that Aristophanes had an intimation of this and that he realized the dramatic art of Athens need not share the city's political fate--precisely because the "solutions" it offered were not political but poetic and self-sustaining visions. Bibliography Bowie, A. M. Aristophanes: Myth, Ritual, and Comedy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Bowie uses anthropological techniques in comparing Aristophanes' plays with Greek myths and rituals with similar story lines in an attempt to discover how the original audiences would have responded to the plays. Includes bibliography and index. Harvey, David, and John Wilkins, eds. The Rivals of Aristophanes: Studies in Athenian Old Comedy. London: Duckworth and the Classical Press of Wales, 2000. Twenty-eight essays on the other comic poets of Athenian Old Comedy, based on the fragments and citations that survive. Includes bibliography. Lada-Richards, Ismene. Initiating Dionysus: Ritual and Theatre in Aristophanes' "Frogs." New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. The author uses literary and anthropological approaches in looking at how a member of Greek society would have viewed the play and Dionysus as a dramatic figure. Includes bibliography and indexes. MacDowell, Douglas M. Aristophanes and Athens: An Introduction to the Plays. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. MacDowell provides an introduction to Aristophanes' plays, including information about Athens and the political climate, essential to understanding some of the allusions in Aristophanes' works. Includes bibliography and index. Russo, Carlo Ferdinando. Aristophanes: An Author for the Stage. New York: Routledge, 1994. Russo examines Aristophanes' dramatic technique in a work that is both scholarly and lively. Includes bibliography and index. Taaffe, Laurne K. Aristophanes and Women. New York: Routledge, 1993. Taaffe examines the portrayal of women in Aristophanes' plays, focusing on Lysistrata, Thesmophoriazusae, and Ecclesiazusae. Includes bibliography and index. Lillian Doherty |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
If you need help with products and ordering, setting up a new account or working with this website, call or email us:
 |
SALEM PRESS, INC. · 131 North El Molino Avenue · Pasadena · CA 91101 © Salem Press, Inc. All Rights Reserved. |