LITMIR.BIZ

Greek playwright Aristophanes spins wonderful stories combining politics, satire, and classic Greek gods in this collection of «Lysistrata and Other Plays.» «Lysistrata» focuses on the women of Greece whose husbands leave for the Peloponnesian War. The women do not care about the war as much as they care about missing their husbands; Lysistrata also insists that men rarely listen to women's reasoning and exclude their opinions on matters of the state. In retaliation, the women of Greece organize a strike, refusing to give their husbands sex until both sides agree to cease fighting. What makes the play tongue-in-cheek is that the men become more upset with their wives than they do with their enemies of war. It was also notable due to its positive portrayal of a woman's rationality in a male-dominated society. Its comedic portrayal of the dumbfounded men has made it a favorite of theatre lovers for years. The other plays, «The Clouds» and «The Acharnians,» are both remembered for their absurd humor and their importance to the Greek theatre. Aristophanes' intelligence and wit is present in all of his works, and the plays contained in «Lysistrata and Other Plays» will captivate and entertain readers for many more years to come.

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Along with Sophocles and Euripides, Aristophanes is considered one of the three great Greek playwrights. Only eleven of his nearly forty plays survive in their entirety to this day. «The Frogs» was produced the year after the death of Euripides, and laments the decay of Greek tragedy which Aristophanes attributed to that writer. It is an admirable example of the brilliance of his style, and of that mingling of wit and poetry with rollicking humor and keen satirical point which is his chief characteristic. Here, as elsewhere, he stands for tradition against innovation of all kinds, whether in politics, religion, or art. The hostility to Euripides displayed here and in several other plays, like his attacks on Socrates, is a result of this attitude of conservatism. The present play is notable also as a piece of elaborate if not over-serious literary criticism from the pen of a great dramatist.

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The story of ‘Plutus’ concerns Chremylus, a poor but just man, who accompanied by his body-servant Cario, consults the Delphic Oracle concerning his son, whether he ought not to be instructed in injustice and knavery and the other arts whereby worldly men acquire riches. By way of answer the god only tells him that he is to follow whomsoever he first meets upon leaving the temple, who proves to be a blind and ragged old man.

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The 'Ecclesiazusae, or Women in Council,' was not produced till twenty years after the preceding play, the 'Thesmophoriazusae' (at the Great Dionysia of 392 B.C.), but is conveniently classed with it as being also largely levelled against the fair sex. "It is a broad, but very amusing, satire upon those ideal republics, founded upon communistic principles, of which Plato's well-known treatise [‘The Republic’] is the best example.—From the introduction to ‘The Ecclesiazusae’ by Aristophanes.

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This Comedy, which was produced by its author the year after the performance of 'The Clouds,' may be taken as in some sort a companion picture to that piece. Here the satire is directed against the passion of the Athenians for the excitement of the law-courts, as in the former its object was the new philosophy. And as the younger generation—the modern school of thought—were there the subjects of the caricature, so here the older citizens, who took their seats in court as jurymen day by day, to the neglect of their private affairs and the encouragement of a litigious disposition, appear in their turn in the mirror which the satirist holds up.—From the introduction to ‘The Wasps’ by Aristophanes.

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Like the 'Lysistrata,' the 'Thesmophoriazusae, or Women's Festival,' and the next following play, the 'Ecclesiazusae, or Women in Council' are comedies in which the fair sex play a great part. In ‘The Thesmophoriazusae’ Euripides is summoned as a notorious woman-hater and detractor of the female sex to appear for trial and judgment before the women of Athens assembled to celebrate the Thesmophoria, a festival held in honour of the goddesses Demeter and Persephone, from which men were rigidly excluded.

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The satire in this, one of the best known of all Aristophanes' comedies, is directed against the new schools of philosophy, or perhaps we should rather say dialectic, which had lately been introduced, mostly from abroad, at Athens. The doctrines held up to ridicule are those of the 'Sophists'—such men as Thrasymachus from Chalcedon in Bithynia, Gorgias from Leontini in Sicily, Protagoras from Abdera in Thrace, and other foreign scholars and rhetoricians who had flocked to Athens as the intellectual centre of the Hellenic world.—From the introduction to ‘The Clouds’ by Aristophanes.

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Along with Sophocles and Euripides, Aristophanes is considered one of the three great Greek playwrights. Only eleven of his nearly forty plays survive in their entirety to this day. «The Frogs and Other Plays» includes the titular play along «The Wasps» and «The Thesmophoriazusae.» Produced the year after the death of Euripides, «The Frogs» laments the decay of Greek tragedy which Aristophanes attributed to that writer. It is an admirable example of the brilliance of his style, and of that mingling of wit and poetry with rollicking humor and keen satirical point which is his chief characteristic. Here, as elsewhere, he stands for tradition against innovation of all kinds, whether in politics, religion, or art. In «The Wasps» Aristophanes pokes satirical fun at the demagogue Cleon and the Athenian law courts that provide Cleon with his power. «The Thesmophoriazusae» is concerned with the schemes of a group of women at the Thesmophoria, an annual fertility celebration dedicated to Demeter, who angered by Euripides portrayal of women in his plays as mad, murderous, and sexually depraved, plan to exact revenge upon him.

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This is the first of the series of three Comedies—'The Acharnians,' 'Peace' and 'Lysistrata'—produced at intervals of years, the sixth, tenth and twenty-first of the Peloponnesian War, and impressing on the Athenian people the miseries and disasters due to it and to the scoundrels who by their selfish and reckless policy had provoked it, the consequent ruin of industry and, above all, agriculture, and the urgency of asking Peace.—From the introduction to 'The Acharnians’ by Aristophanes.

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Along with Sophocles and Euripides, Aristophanes is considered one of the three great Greek playwrights. Only eleven of his nearly forty plays survive in their entirety to this day. Of his extant works Aristophanes's «Lysistrata» is considered one of his finest and one of the truly great comedies from classical antiquity. Central to the work is the vow by the women of Greece to withhold sex from their husbands until they end the brutal war between Athens and Sparta. A hilarious and decisively anti-war comedic drama, «Lysistrata» stands as one of the most important works from classical antiquity.

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