The Birds and Other Plays: The Knight, Peace, Wealth, the Birds, the Assemblywomen (Penguin Classics)

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Summary: A Review on Aristophanes' Plays
Review: Aristophanes is considered the finest comic playwrite of the Classical Era. This is certainly born out through the selection in this volume. Birds is a comedy about an Athenian who decides to incite the birds to take over the world and replace the classical deities as its rulers. Both Lysistrata and Assembly-Women are about what would happen if the women took over the government. In the former, the women of Greece band together in a sex-strike, to end the Pelopennesian Wars. In the later, the Athenian women use trickery to be elected the the leaders of the democracy, and they institute economic and sexual communism. In the last selection, Wealth, the deity of Wealth, Ploutos, is captured and made to distribute wealth only to the good. However, as Poverty points out, that might not be a good thing. These plays are full of topical comedy, but much of the humor still is funny 2400 years later. The translation is very uncensored, as Greek comedy itself was, so that very little is lost in metaphor. The imagery in some of them is highly amusing. Although this is a great example of the way life was in Classic Athens, these plays are not for the squeamish!!