Political Comedy in Aristophanes

This paper argues that Aristophanic comedy, although it takes contemporary political life as its point of departure, is not political in the sense of aiming to influence politics outside the theatre. Brief discussions of Clouds, Knights, Lysistrata and Acharnians are used to cast initial doubt on interpretations that attribute serious intent to Aristophanes. It is then argued that Aristophanes’ treatment of the poet’s role as adviser, abuse of the audience and of individuals, the themes of rich and poor and the power of the dêmos, support this conclusion. In general, the assumptions of Aristophanes’ comedy are too closely attuned to those of the majority of his audience to warrant inferences about Aristophanes’ own political attitudes. This conclusion throws light on the democracy’s exercise of control over the theatre. An appendix argues that the main unifying element in Aristophanic comedy is not theme, but plot, and that Aristophanes took more care over coherence of plot-structure than is sometimes recognised

Aristophanes and his rivals

This paper provides an introduction to the work of Aristophanes’ main rivals, especially Cratinus and Eupolis

Social Class

Discussion of class structure in fifth-century Athens, historical constitution of theater audiences, and the changes in the comic representation of class antagonism from Aristophanes to Menander

Transposing Aristophanes: the theory and practice of translating Aristophanic lyric

The reception of Aristophanes has gained extraordinary momentum as a topic of academic interest in the last few years. Contributions range from Gonda Van Steen's ground-breaking Venom in Verse. Aristophanes in Modern Greece to Hall and Wrigley's Aristophanes in Performance 421 BC–AD 2007, which contains contributions from a wide range of scholars and writers, a number of whom have had experience of staging Aristophanes' plays as live theatre. In Found in Translation, J. Michael Walton has also made strides towards marrying the theory of translation to the practice of translating Aristophanes (something I have myself also sought to do in print). And with the history of Aristophanic translation, adaptation, and staging being rapidly pieced together (in the English-speaking world at least, where Hall, Steggle, Halliwell, Sowerby, Walsh, and Walton, for example, have all made their own contributions), much of the groundwork has been laid for a study such as is attempted in this article. Here I aim to take a broad look across a range of translations in order to see how one particular text type within Aristophanic drama has been approached by translators, namely Aristophanes' lyric passages. The aim of this study will be to give both an insight into the numerous considerations that translators take into account when translating Aristophanic lyric and an impression of the range of end products that have emerged over the last two hundred years

The Work of Tragic Productions: Towards a New History of Drama as Labor Culture

Preliminary analysis of the representation of laborers in Greek tragedy and satyr drama

Publics and Audiences in Ancient Greece

An overview of the historical constitution of theater audiences in Classical Athens and the implications of this assessment. I first sketch out the dominant ways in which modern scholars have defined ancient audiences. I argue that attention to (male) citizenship or Greek identity has effaced the presence and role of other groups in the audience. In the second section I discuss the evidence for audiences in ancient Athens. Available space for spectators and the various barriers to these spaces shaped the diverse constitution of audiences; from the Classical to early Hellenistic period (ca. 480–300 BC), theaters did not merely expand and proliferate but redefined the make-up of audiences. The third section explores the discourse of audiences in ancient sources. As I briefly elaborate in the conclusion, this chapter aims to unsettle and provincialize the idea of citizen audiences

Crisis and philosophy: Aeschylus and Euripides on Orestes' crimes

Since the XIX century, a pleiad of philosophers and historians support the idea that Greek philosophy, usually reported to have started with the presocratics, lays its basis in a previous moment: the Greek myths – systematized by Homer and Hesiod – and the Greek arts, in particular the lyric and tragedy literature. According to this, it is important to retrieve philosophical elements even before the pre-Socratics to understand the genesis of specific concepts in Philosophy of Law. Besides, assuming that the Western’s core values are inherited from Ancient Greece, it is essential to recuperate the basis of our own justice idea, through the Greek myths and tragedy literature. As a case study, this paper aims on the comparison of two key-works, each one representing a phase of the Greek tragedy: The Orestea, by Aeschylus, and Orestes, by Euripides. Both contain the same story, telling how the Greeks understood the necessity of solving their conflicts not by blood revenge, but through a political way, and also the political drama. Although, in Aeschylus’s one, men still leashed by their fate, while the gods play a major role, in order to punish human pride (hybris). In a different way, on Euripides’s work men face their own loneliness, in a world fulfilled with gods, each one demanding divergent actions. That represents a necessary moment to the flourishing freedom and human subjectivity, and, once the exterior divinity is unable to resolve human problems, men will need to discover their interior divinity: that is how the Philosophy emerges