ChronologyIntroduction & NotesFurther ReadingTranslator's NoteNote on the TextPreface to The Acharnians--The AcharniansPreface to The Clouds--The CloudsPreface to Lysistrata--LysistrataNotes

This review is of the translation by Alan H. Sommerstein.Only a couple of pages into the actual play itself, Sommerstein footnotes a line of dialogue by the Spartan Lampito: The translator has put the speech of the Spartan characters in Scotch dialect which is related to English about as was the Spartan dialect to the speech of Athens. The Spartans, in their character, anticipated the shrewd, canny, uncouth Scotch highlander of modern times. I mean... sure. Very typical of Penguin Classics. At...

The AcharniansNo idea what I was expecting from my first venture into Classical Greek comedy, but it wasn't the crude, lewd, verbal and physical humour coupled with puns and political and personal satire that I got! The Introduction and notes were extremely useful for setting the historical and cultural scene, explaining how the Comedy of the day worked and elucidating obscure references and jokes. This made me wonder how well it would go on the modern stage, where one would surely expect most o...

Review Found Here

LysistrataNo Peacey,No Pussy!! - or -Make Love or Make War,You can't have both!The women of Greece, tired of war and its devastation, bring their message home to the men, et voilà, the Peace Movement is launched...

Full review to come!

Peace is a major theme of these plays (this review only covers Lysistrata & The Acharnians). The Acharnians focuses on arguments against war among the men, while Lysistrata is a bawdy and demented fest of diatribes between women and men. When the women, led by the titular character, withhold their sex in their demand for peace the men seem to be at a significant disadvantage.The Acharnians is set during the Peloponnesian War during the sixth year of conflict between Athens and Sparta. In Aristop...

“If once we let these women get the semblance of a start,Before we know, they'll be adept at every manly art.They'll turn their hands to building ships, and then they'll make a bidTo fight our fleet and ram us, just like Artemisia did."”--------------------WHY are the Antic Greeks so damn bawdy?!For a book that I first read in high school for my English class, Lysistrata has left quite a weird impression in my head. Imagine confidently assigning a group of 16 year olds to read about a play, whic...

3.5-4 stars was pretty jokes and lots of quotable quotes but would be way better if i was taught it or if i bothered to analyse it

I read Lysistrata because I want to teach something besides Oedipus. It is hilarious and vulgar but sadly I think my students would run to the dean if they had to read it. Back to the drawing board…

In The Acharnians a crafty, homely farmer makes a separate peace because he is tired of doing without. In Lysistrata the women of the city-states at war decided they’ve had enough and begin a boycott of sex to compel their husbands and lovers to make peace. In Clouds, a man near financial ruin because of his no-good son’s fondness for luxury decides that a good education by the sophists will help him escape his debts by giving him the power to win any lawsuit. The humor is broad, bawdy to the po...

So *surprise* this is another book that I had to read for class (I'm drowning in them, it's fine). This was actually the best one I've gotten to read for my minor--at least for this semester. Despite the plays being like 2500 years old, the translation was awesome and easy to read, and it was actually SO FUNNY. There were 3 plays in here, and my least favorite to favorite were The Clouds (2/5), The Archarnians (3/5), and Lysistrata (4/5). Of course the humor is also absurd because that's how Anc...

We only read Lysistrata in clubbe, but 1-star for the translator of this Penguin edition, who indicates the Spartans as foreign through dialect... that was maybe Rastafarian?

After reading two of the three plays contained within, I think it's fairly clear that Aristophanes (and likely any Greek play in general) is not for me. These are too reliant on knowledge of contemporaries in Ancient Greece and the placement of footnotes at the end of the book rather than near the play itself disrupts the flow. Not to mention, I find the plays themselves to be absurd.

The translation is well done, hence the rating, but I had forgotten since I last read this for college how horrible and nasty these plays are. I do not recommend reading this.

The Acharneans - 3.5/5The Clouds - 5/5Lysistrata - 5/5'Lysistrata' is a bawdy, sexual comedy, and it was hilarious; however, my favourite in this collection was definitely "The Clouds" (which bombed when it was first performed, which goes to show that even in olden times, underrated pieces are usually more genius than the mass-loved ones). It was a laugh riot. "The Acharneans" (which was a hit, hence proving my previous assertion) was alright; it did have its moments but overall, pretty forgetta...

Lysistrada and Other Plays was an excellent and hilarious play to read with the withholding sex to encourage ceasefire. This is most defiantly a comedy and there were several moments I found myself laughing out loud because of the language and the way the women would use withholding of sex as a tool to try to get their personal political views noticed. The dynamic between the men and women in the choruses also reveals the dependency between the domestic and political lives of the people in Athen...

Lysistrata and Other Plays by AristophanesPlease give my Amazon review a helpful vote - https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-re... I have reviewed the Acharnians and the Clouds separately, so this review will be on this text and Lysistrata.Lysistrata is fairly famous. It has repeatedly been made into movies, including a Spike Lee movie called "Chi-Raq." The trope of war-weary women refusing to engage in sex with their husbands until the men call off a war, in this case, the Peloponnesian War, hits...

Lysistrata was defiantly an interesting read, I didn’t love it but I didn’t hate it. From the beginning it gets your attention because of all the sex talk lol. The jokes were something else. However that’s what made the story so captivating, the fact that these ladies used sex to get what they wanted was funny to me because till this day women still use that strategy. It did make me think about Aristophanes, and how or what he was thinking when he wrote this. The story’s plot line was easy to fi...

As has been pointed out to me repeatedly over the years, my twelfth grade honors curriculum is pretty heavy on tragedies. Toying with the idea of rewriting the course to include some comedies, I read Lysistrata, something I've been meaning to do for years. Probably not the best choice for high school seniors, what with all the exaggerated erect phalluses and all (in the play, that is). Strange choice by this translator, too, to render the speech of the Spartans as a Scottish dialect.

Such a fantastic play! Hilarious sexual jokes on every page, and so refreshing to have an ancient play where the main characters are women- clever women, wily women, funny women, women who can fight men and come off the better. Only the men are the real butts of the jokes, and most are made out to be foolish brutes who stumble around waving their swords (wink) blindly.

Rounding up from 2.5A fairly ridiculous and surprisingly raunchy play about a sex strike for peace. It’s quite silly, but sometimes amusing. This show would need to be on HBO. O:N 2019 = 1:3.8I’m going in the wrong direction. I’m letting down MGM and CSL

This should be fun to teach.

One of my favourite Greek Comedies. Feminism, phallic humour, banter.

"Oh, I liked that one – a gecko shitting in Socrates' face!" (pg. 80)Comedy is always the hardest thing to translate. Even in one society, tastes are subjective, whereas translating into another language inevitably loses something, not least in wordplay, and translating across time – in this case more than 2,000 years – seems a thankless task. With that in mind, it is surprising just how much of Alan Sommerstein's translation of Aristophanes' Ancient Greek plays actually works.Each of the plays

This trio of plays from one of the fathers of Greek comedy shows that both bathroom humor and locker room talk are nothing new. Aristophanes’ plays are pointed satires, expressing the popular (and common) frustrations against the political elites of his day. They continue to resonate thousands of years later. Is this the high point of Western literature or of comedy? No, but they are a masterful start.The Acharnians is one of Aristophanes’ so-called “peace plays.” It’s a story of a farmer, Dikai...

Lysistrata and Other Plays can best be labelled as acts of buffoonery distilled to its most vulgar jests and posturings.Of the surviving plays, "The Archanians", "The Clouds", and "Lysistrata", Aristophanes shows himself as a "takes no prisoners" kind of playwright: ready to ridicule all asunder! Everything is an opportunity for ridicule: notions of what constitutes war and peace, the dangers of critical thinking and rhetoric, and the tension between power and sex -- Aristophanes has got it cove...

Of the three plays here presented, The Clouds is most funny and most interesting. It resembles to me an interesting schism in the mind of Aristophanes: like in Frogs, it seems the poet revels in sophistry and all its guises, but in the narrative of the play will award victory to the conservative party. As though Aristophanes recognizes some gap between his aesthetic preferences and the moral, general good; or at the least, he wishes to cultivate some spectre of the Public Good. He parallels Euri...

Love – or at least lust – wins out over war in Aristophanes’ Lysistrata; everybody knows that. But what stands out about this Penguin Books edition of Lysistrata is the way in which Lysistrata is brought together with two other, perhaps lesser-known plays from Aristophanes’ canon, all of which are united by the way in which the great Athenian comic dramatist uses comedy to confront the society of his time. Two of these plays -- Lysistrata itself and The Acharnians -- provide trenchant commentary...

A collection of amazingly funny and educational plays. The intro is incredibly useful for historical context and a summary of Aristophanes. Here's my thoughts on both plays I hadn't read before:The Acharnians:This is absolutely hilarious, there's so many good pun scenes: different ages of wine as metaphors for different durations of a possible peace treaty, an uncomfortable but language-wise genius scene about "porkers", and it all feels very on the nose of Aristie just trying to say "War is bad...