This book opens up a new perspective on Aristophanic drama and its relationship to Greek religion. It focuses on the comedy Wealth, whose fantasy of universal enrichment is structured upon a rich and ...largely unexplored framework of traditional stories of Greek religious experiences, such as oracles, miracle cures, and the introduction of new gods. The book examines the form and function of these stories, and explores how the playwright adapts them for his own comic purposes, grounding his comic fantasy on stories of philanthropic divinities who dependably respond to the needs of their worshippers. The collaboration of these deities, who act in tandem with their worshippers, achieves the comic fantasy. Francisco Barrenechea also addresses the larger question of how comedy participated in the religion of its time by imagining and dramatizing beliefs, and reveals the salutary bond that can exist between humor and religion in general.
This study of Aristophanes provides the basis for a total re-assessment not only of Aristophanes as a poet and playwright, but also of our perception of politics and the role of the theatre in ...classical Athens. It shows how Aristophanes used allegorical means to comment on the day-to-day political concerns of Athenians, in particular the problems presented by the gradual emergence of Alcibiades as one of the most powerful figures in the state.
Athenian comic drama was written for performance at festivals honouring the god Dionysos. Through dramatic action and open discourse, poets sought to engage their rivals and impress the audience, all ...in an effort to obtain victory in the competitions. This book uses that competitive performance context as an interpretive framework within which to understand the thematic interests shaping the plots and poetic quality of Aristophanes' plays in particular, and of Old Comedy in general. Studying five individual plays from the Aristophanic corpus as well as fragments of other comic poets, it reveals the competitive poetics distinctive to each. It also traces thematic connections with other poetic traditions, especially epic, lyric, and tragedy, and thereby seeks to place competitive poetics within broader trends in Greek literature.
This book provides a new interpretation of the nature of Old Comedy and its place at the heart of Athenian democratic politics. Professor Sidwell argues that Aristophanes and his rivals belonged to ...opposing political groups, each with their own political agenda. Through disguised caricature and parody of their rivals' work, the poets expressed and fuelled the political conflict between their factions. Professor Sidwell rereads the principal texts of Aristophanes and the fragmented remains of the work of his rivals in the light of these arguments for the political foundations of the genre.
Este trabalho tem por objetivo iluminar o corpus de fragmentos da comédia antiga, em geral ofuscado pelas 11 comédias preservadas de Aristófanes. Apresenta-se aqui a primeira tradução anotada, para o ...português, dos fragmentos do poeta cômico e de suas fontes. O volume contém ainda uma introdução dedicada
This book presents a collection of new studies on the political aspects of Aristophanes' comic plays, produced in Athens in the latter half of the 5th century BCE.
This article bridges a gap in the study of Aristophanic humour by better demonstrating how individual jokes (in this case, the para prosdokian ‘contrary to expectation’ joke) contribute to the wider ...comic scenes in which they are embedded. After analysing ancient and modern explanations and examples of para prosdokian jokes, this paper introduces the concept of ‘comic bit’, a discrete unit of comedy that builds humour around a central premise, and establishes how para prosdokian jokes contribute to comic bits in a way that recent theories of para prosdokian cannot account for.
