Customer Reviews

The Greek Classics: Aristophanes - Eleven Plays

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IGNORE the wretched (obviously publisher-promoting) 5-star bombastic reviews (I can't imagine how these texts deserve even a single star, and it's a pity Amazon doesn't allow no-star reviews), and be warned against the whole GREEK CLASSICS series: Aeschylus, Sophocles, Aristophanes, and this Euripides edition. For a start, many lines have disappeared: eg some of those occurring in the scene between Clytemnestra and Agamemnon in Aeschylus; in spite of the uninterrupted pagination, more than half of Euripides' ORESTES is missing (I ask if this incomplete text made sense at all to those who boast of and insist on the book's 'completeness'); lines from CYCLOPS have also gone missing obviously for reasons of decorum; this, of course, is also true of the bowdlerized Aristophanes edition, where everyone behaves according to Victorian morality (I don't understand how this series' Aristophanes - according to a reviewer - is 'bawdy' and 'rude'). The absence of annotations and the presence of countless typos is nothing, compared to the translations themselves. Made between the 18th and early 20th centuries, these out-of-copyright translations have long been past their sell-by dates. The verse quality is so poor that it insults Greek drama (talk of 'Greek' when particular characters are 'translated' into their 'Roman' counterparts): written in embarrassingly tortuous syntax, the stilted lines read like some cheap and desperate attempt at reproducing 'mythical' versions of the Bible and Shakespeare. The whole effect is 'tragically' hilarious: if those (especially 20th-Century) translators had incorporated innumerable thee's and thou's into their texts in the hope of evoking the original Greek, they were laughably mistaken. According to one reviewer, the Euripides edition 'is a book you can be proud to own'; another, having finished the 'entire set' (ie all four volumes), is 'looking forward to re-reading them': misled by the previous infantile reviews into purchasing this series, I am ashamed of making a donation of it to any library, though a reviewer considers this to be '[a]n excellent addition to any classical library'. Did I mention that almost all of these translations are available online for free? Mould is, indeed, gold.

This collection of the surviving works of Aristophanes is a time capsule that shows quite clearly that humor and a sense of fun were present even in ancient Greece. The sometimes crude and crass jocularity had a point - to skewer the opposition. It has succeeded wildly throughout the ages. Parody and ridicule are as effective as they are timeless, particularly when really funny.

As you read Aristophanes, and find yourself laughing time and again, you can't help but recognize some of the jokes and ask yourself how many times in the history of the world have these jibes been reused. Some of them have been so overworked that they have lost much of their zing - but it is marvelous to recognize that they were probably used first, and best, by Aristophanes.

It is important to note that humor is just as important a part of a classical education as is drama or science. This book is one of the very best examples.