Introduction

Summary

No special justification is needed for a new collection of interpretive essays on Aristophanes: of all the major writers of the fifth century he is surely (at least in the English-speaking world) one of the most neglected by classicists. The absence of up-to-date texts and commentaries for most of the plays exacerbates the problem. As anyone who has tried to teach Aristophanes in Greek or in translation will attest, the task of making the plays available to students is beset by many formidable problems not encountered in the case of other Greek authors. Aristophanes is a comic playwright composing in a defunct and often alien mode about topical subjects only imperfectly intelligible to a distant posterity. An ancient tragedian, historian, philosopher or orator has at least the advantage of writing in forms either still viable or made much more viable by extensive scholarly and critical exegesis. It seems to me that as a result an unfortunate trend has developed: Aristophanes, despite his own insistence to the contrary and despite his having written about the same topics as his contemporaries, has more and more been denied the status of a serious and/or intelligible spokesman for his times. Rather than perform the difficult job of establishing a methodology for deciding the matter one way or the other, many scholars have decided that Aristophanes is primarily a humorist of genius whose views about matters of perennial concern are either undiscoverable or, if discoverable, much less important and useful than those recoverable from other contemporary sources.