Description
Harvard Acharnians. Knights 1998 Edition by Aristophanes, Jeffrey Henderson
Aristophanes of Athens (ca. 446-386 b.c.), one of the world's great comic dramatists, has been admired since antiquity for his wit and fantasy, language, satire of the social, intellectual and political life of Athens at its height. He wrote at least 40 plays, of which 11 have survived complete. In this volume, Jeffrey Henderson presents a newly edited Greek text of two plays and a translation with full explanatory notes for the late 1990s. In "Acharnians" a small landowner, tired of the Peloponnesian War, magically arranges a personal peace treaty and demonstrates the injustice of the war in a contest with the bellicose Acharnians. "Knights" is a political satire. The introduction brings current scholarly insights to bear on the problem of the comic poet as a political force.