Aristophanes: Frogs (Aristophanes) [Paperback]

W. Stanford (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 19, 2009 | ISBN-10: 0862921155 | ISBN-13: 978-0862921156

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Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Duckworth Publishers (August 19, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0862921155
• ISBN-13: 978-0862921156
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.9 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,786,918 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Stanford's Commentary on Aristophanes' Frogs, November 26, 2011

By 

Eustathios - See all my reviews

This review is from: Aristophanes: Frogs (Aristophanes) (Paperback)

This is a review of W.B. Stanford's commentary on Aristophanes' Frogs published by Bristol Classical Press. This is a truly excellent and underutilized commentary of one of the masterpieces of ancient Greek Literature. Among many great merits it possesses, the greatest perhaps is that it evinces an over-arching concern with helping the reader understand the content and tone of Aristophanes' poetry. Difficult or obscure Greek is very frequently rendered into English that captures the spirit of the original while retaining enough of its shape and structure that the grammar and syntax underlying the Greek can be inferred. Indeed, although there is very little explanation and elucidation of individual case usages, verb tenses, subordinate clauses, and the like, a reader with a few years of Greek and a dictionary should be able to read the Frogs with relative ease using this commentary if his/her goal is to seriously engage with the text as a work of literature and a cultural artifact. As a pedagogical tool to review grammar or to serve as an introduction to Greek drama, however, this commentary would perhaps not function quite as well given the relatively advanced capabilities it assumes in the reader.

This book's rather short page length (a 59 page introduction, 67 pages of text, and 143 pages of commentary plus a short bibliography) belies the vast amount of material that Stanford has incorporated into his commentary. The commentary proper is quite dense and written in very small print. Among other things, Stanford discusses metrical issues, the meaning and etymology of rare or obscure words/phrases/idioms, characterization, the meaning of figurative language, problems of setting and staging, the meaning and provenance of the many historical, political, and literary allusions that appear in the play, and the religious traditions and beliefs that inform the play. Stanford's analysis ultimately situates the Frogs in its historical, religious, and performative moment in a way that allows the modern reader to grasp a fair amount of the cultural baggage and expectations an Athenian audience might have brought to a performance of the Frogs. Stanford does not however devote much attention to contextualizing the Frogs within Aristophanes' broader oeuvre, offering very little comparative analysis of the Frogs with Aristophanes' other plays. Whether this is a defect or not depends upon the uses to which the reader wishes to put this commentary.

A final mark of distinction to mention is that this commentary is exceptionally well-written and entertaining to read, the intervening half-century since its publication not having diminished either its accessibility or its charm. One even gets the sense that Stanford engages in some comedic tongue-in-cheek on occasion. On page 122, defining the noun "prostates", he writes: "'official protector', i.e. an influential Athenian citizen chosen by a resident alien (who would not have full political rights) to protect his interests, like a Roman patronus or an undergraduate tutor." On the same page, discussing a phrase that means "will wind these things out of him", he writes: "a horrifying expression...Perhaps the Innkeeper is thinking of something like the vengeance taken (according to the Burnt Njal Saga) on the slayer of King Brian Boru at Clontarf: 'Wolf the quarrelsome...wound all the entrails out of him'. (And cf. the song of the witches after the battle: 'The woof is y-woven, With entrails of men'.)."

Of course, this commentary is now somewhat dated given the advances in scholarship on Aristophanes since it was published, but as a tool to prepare for an exam, read for a survey course, or read the Frogs for pleasure, I think most people would find Stanford's commentary extremely useful, efficient, and profitable. There are very few commentaries on Aristophanes' plays of which this could be said.

4 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Aristophanes's farcical attempt at dramatic criticism, June 11, 2002

By 

Lawrance M. Bernabo (The Zenith City, Duluth, Minnesota) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Aristophanes: Frogs (Aristophanes) (Paperback)

On the one hand Aristophanes's comedy "The Frogs" is obviously a farce, but it is of more interest because it presents the earliest known example of dramatic criticism. Presented in 405 B.C., the play tells of how Dionysus, the god of drama, had to go to Hades to fetch back Euripides, who died the previous year, because Athens no longer had any great tragic poets left. The first part of the comedy involves Dionysus, who has disguised himself as Heracles, and his slave Xanthias on their way to Hades and features several interesting songs by the chorus of blessed mystics and the chorus of frogs. However, the high point of the comedy is the contest between Euripides and Aeschylus.

Each of the two great tragic poets denounces the other and quotes lines from their own works to prove their superiority. We discover that Euripides writes about vulgar themes, corrupts manners, debases music and has prosaic diction. In contrast, Aeschylus finds obscure titles and is guilty of turgid prose. In the end Dionysus finds that artistic standards of judgment are useless and turns to a political solution. This makes sense since the problem facing Athens is a political one: what to do about the tyrant Alcibiades. What is most interesting is the implicit belief that the tragic poets had a social responsibility towards the audiences of their dramas.

"Frogs," in addition to being one of the better comedies by Aristophanes, is also of interest because it contains the only fragments from several tragedies by Euripides and Aeschylus that have been long lost to us. As always, I urge that if you are studying Greek plays, whether the comedies of Aristophanes or the tragedies by those other more serious fellows, it is important to understand the particular structure of these plays and the various dramatic conventions of the Greek theater. This involves not only the distinction between episodes and stasimons (scenes and songs), but elements like the "agon" (a formal debate on the crucial issue of the play), and the "parabasis" (in which the Chorus partially abandons its dramatic role and addresses the audience directly).