The Eleven Comedies, vol 1, page 1 by Aristophanes
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uction To Each Comedy And Elucidatory Notes
The First Of Two Volumes
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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
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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, cont