Penn Greek drama series

"Aristophanes wrote most of his comedic masterpieces during the Peloponnesian wars, parodying the tumultuous politics and society of that time with trademark innuendoes and bawdy stagings and dialogue. [v. 1:] In these plays, Aristophanes brings every rhetorical stratagem into play to treat the reader to stories of one man's attempt to create a "war-free zone', the rescue of the imprisoned Peace on the back of a giant dung beetle, a satire of Euripides' sympathies for women, and the hustling and healing of a blind and destitute Wealth in order to redistribute the world's riches. [v. 3:] These plays contain, in turn, the sharpest political satire to be found in Aristophanes, a famous caricature of Socrates and the sophists, and the escapist fantasy of a city in the clouds."--Book jackets.

These comedies by Menander reveal that the oft-employed theme of mistaken identity is as old as the Great Dionysia. Teachers and students will find that this edition remains loyal to the Greek originals without confining itself to the literalism that has made many previous translations unusable in the classroom and inaccessible to general readers. These translations promise to become the standard for decades to come, introducing readers to the timelessness of the human experience brilliantly depicted in classical Greek drama.