Read complete books and articles on: Aristophanes' Birds

Aristophanes - ărˌĭstŏfˈənēz, c.448 b.c.–c.388 b.c., Greek playwright, Athenian comic poet, greatest of the ancient writers of comedy. His plays, the only full extant samples of the Greek Old Comedy, mix political, social, and literary satire. The direct attack on persons, the severity of invective, and the burlesque extravagances made the plays fitting for the festival of Dionysus. Aristophanes was conservative in all things, hence he distrusted sophistry and Socrates alike, satirized Euripides' art as degenerate, and deplored the tendency to excessive imperialism that ruined Athens in the Syracusan expedition. The typical plan of an Aristophanic comedy is simple—the protagonist undertakes seriously some preposterous project, and the play is an elaboration of his success or failure. Despite the absurdity of the situation, Aristophanes' characters are real as types; their verisimilitude comes from their perfectly natural behavior in unnatural circumstances. Aristophanes' Greek is exceptionally beautiful, and many of his choruses are among the finest lyric pieces in Greek literature. His careful diction and his ability to characterize in a few words are remarkable, and he shows himself especially astute in his parodies of Euripides. Eleven of his plays survive: The Acharnians (425 b.c.), an attack on the Peloponnesian War; The Knights (424), a political satire on the demagoguery of the period; The Clouds (423), a satire on the sophists and on Socrates; The Wasps (422), a satire on the Athenian passion for litigation; The Peace (421), a defense of the Peace of Nicias; The Birds (414), an escape into an amazing imaginary kingdom; Lysistrata (411), in which the Athenian women boycott their husbands to end a war; The Thesmophoriazusae or The Women at Demeter's Festival (411), in which the women conspire to ruin Euripides because of his misogyny; The Frogs (405), a literary satire involving Aeschylus and Euripides; The Ecclesiazusae or The Women in Politics (c.392), in which the women take over the government; and Plutus (388), in which the blind god of wealth recovers his eyesight and distributes the gifts of fortune more equitably.

See his plays (ed. by M. Hadas, 1962, 1984); studies by G. Murray (1933, repr. 1964), C. Whitman (1964), K. J. Dover (1972), and V. Ehrenberg (new ed. 1974).

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9 of the Best Books and Articles on: Aristophanes' Birds

as selected by Questia librarians

1.

Birds » Read Now
by Aristophanes, Nan Dunbar. 542 pgs.

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Birds is generally recognized as one of Aristophanes' masterpieces, for its imaginative plot (it is the source of the word "Cloudcuckooland"), and its charming and original lyrics. This abridgement of Nan Dunbar's widely acclaimed edition of Birds, published in 1995, preserves all the material...
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Birds is generally recognized as one of Aristophanes' masterpieces, for its imaginative plot (it is the source of the word "Cloudcuckooland"), and its charming and original lyrics. This abridgement of Nan Dunbar's widely acclaimed edition of Birds, published in 1995, preserves all the material designed to help the less advanced student of Greek or the non-specialist to translate, understand, and enjoy the play. It also retains the notes on staging, but the metrical, textual, and ornithological problems are dealt with more summarily, and purely illustrative parallels are omitted.
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2.

Aristophanes, an Author for the Stage (Chap. 8 "Birds") » Read Now
by Carlo Ferdinando Russo. 282 pgs.

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Carlo Ferdinando Russo's book has been a seminal work on Aristophanes since its publication in Italy in 1962. In his detailed analysis, Professor Russo considers the plays as libretti for actors and singers rather than as mere texts, and never loses sight of the stage. This is the classic book...
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Carlo Ferdinando Russo's book has been a seminal work on Aristophanes since its publication in Italy in 1962. In his detailed analysis, Professor Russo considers the plays as libretti for actors and singers rather than as mere texts, and never loses sight of the stage. This is the classic book about Aristophanes. Now finally available in English and much-updated, it is essential reading for any student of Athenian comedy.
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3.

Aristophanes and Athens: An Introduction to the Plays (Chap. 9 "Birds") » Read Now
by Douglas M. MacDowell. 362 pgs.

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4.

Oxford Readings in Aristophanes (Chap. 11 "Some Aspects of Aristophanes' Dramatic Art in the Birds") » Read Now
by Erich Segal. 335 pgs.

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Aristophanes is the only author of Greek Attic comedy whose work survives in any form beyond fragments. His eleven surviving comedies reflect the spirit of Athens in the golden age and its unique freedom of speech. This anthology brings together all the most important contributions to the study of...
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Aristophanes is the only author of Greek Attic comedy whose work survives in any form beyond fragments. His eleven surviving comedies reflect the spirit of Athens in the golden age and its unique freedom of speech. This anthology brings together all the most important contributions to the study of Aristophanes; it addresses a range of subjects from the classic question of Aristophanes' relationship to contemporary politics to more modern issues such as performance context, the interaction between fifth century comedy and tragedy, and gender
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5.

The City as Comedy: Society and Representation in Athenian Drama ("Utopianism and the Sophistic City in Aristophanes' Birds" begins on p. 23 and "Performing the City in Birds" begins on p. 75) » Read Now
by Gregory W. Dobrov. 356 pgs.

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6.

Pericles on Stage: Political Comedy in Aristophanes' Early Plays ("Alcibiades at Sparta: Aristophanes' Birds I" begins on p. 154 and "Pericles at Sparta: Aristophanes' Birds II" begins on p. 171) » Read Now
by Michael Vickers. 262 pgs.

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Since the eighteenth century, classical scholars have generally agreed that the Greek playwright Aristophanes did not as a matter of course write "political" plays. Yet, according to an anonymous Life of Aristophanes, when Dionysius the tyrant of Syracuse wanted to know about the government of...
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Since the eighteenth century, classical scholars have generally agreed that the Greek playwright Aristophanes did not as a matter of course write "political" plays. Yet, according to an anonymous Life of Aristophanes, when Dionysius the tyrant of Syracuse wanted to know about the government of Athens, Plato sent him a copy of Aristophanes' Clouds.In this boldly revisionist work, Michael Vickers convincingly argues that in his earlier plays, Aristophanes in fact commented on the day-to-day political concerns of Athenians. Vickers reads the first six of Aristophanes' eleven extant plays in a way that reveals the principal characters to be based in large part on Pericles and his ward Alcibiades.According to Vickers, the plays of Aristophanes--far from being nonpolitical--actually allow us to gauge the reaction of the Athenian public to the events that followed Pericles' death in 429 B.C., to the struggle for the political succession, and to the problems presented by Alcibiades' emergence as one of the most powerful figures in the state. This view of Aristophanes reaffirms the central role of allegory in his work and challenges all students of ancient Greece to rethink long-held assumptions about this important playwright.
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7.

Figures of Play: Greek Drama and Metafictional Poetics (Chap. 7 "Tereus: Sophokles' Tereus and Aristophanes' Birds") » Read Now
by Gregory W. Dobrov. 240 pgs.

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Figures of Play explores the reflexive aspects of ancient theatrical culture across genres. Fifth century tragedy and comedy sublimated the agonistic basis of Greek civilization in a way that invited the community of the polis to confront itself. In the theatre, as in the courts and assemblies, a...
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Figures of Play explores the reflexive aspects of ancient theatrical culture across genres. Fifth century tragedy and comedy sublimated the agonistic basis of Greek civilization in a way that invited the community of the polis to confront itself. In the theatre, as in the courts and assemblies, a significant subset of the Athenian public was spectator and judge of contests where important social and ideological issues were played to it by its own members. The "syntax" of drama is shown to involve specific "figures of play" through which the theatrical medium turns back on itself to study the various contexts of its production. Greek tragedy and comedy were argued to be tempermentally metafictional in that they are always involved in recycling older fictions into contemporary scenarios of immediate relevance to the polis. The phemonenology of this process is discussed under three headings, each a "figure of play": 1) surface play--momentary disruption of the theatrical pretense through word, sign, gesture; 2) mise en abyme--a mini-drama embedded in a larger framework; 3) contrafact--an extended remake in which one play is based on another. Following three chapters in which this framework is set forth and illustrated with concrete examples there are five case studies named after the protagonists of the plays in question: Aias, Pentheus, Tereus, Bellerophontes, Herakles. Hence the other meaning of "figures of play" as stage figures. In the second section of the book on "the Anatomy of Dramatic Fiction," special attention is paid to the interaction between genres. In particular, Aristophanic comedy is shown to be engaged in an intense rivalry with tragedy that underscores the different ways in which each genre deployed its powers of representation. Tragedy refashions myth: in Bakkhai, for example, it is argued that Euripides reinvented Dionysis to be specifically a theatrical god, a symbol of tragedy's powers of representation. Comedy refashions tragedy: in a series of utopian comedies, Aristophanes re-enacts a tragic scenario in a way that revals comedy as a superior means of solving political and social crisis.
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8.

Aristophanes' Old-And-New Comedy (Chap. 29 "Utopia Unlimited") » Read Now
by Kenneth J. Reckford. 567 pgs.

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9.

The Thinker as Artist: From Homer to Plato & Aristotle ("On the Birds" begins on p. 157) » Read Now
by George Anastaplo. 410 pgs.

Collections: Philosophy, Literature, Entire Library

In an attempt to subject representative texts of a dozen ancient authors to a more or less Socratic inquiry, the noted scholar George Anastaplo suggests in The Thinker as Artist how one might usefully read as well as enjoy such texts, which illustrate the thinking done by the greatest artists and...
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In an attempt to subject representative texts of a dozen ancient authors to a more or less Socratic inquiry, the noted scholar George Anastaplo suggests in The Thinker as Artist how one might usefully read as well as enjoy such texts, which illustrate the thinking done by the greatest artists and how they "talk" among themselves across the centuries. In doing so, he does not presume to repeat the many fine things said about these and like authors, but rather he discusses what he himself has noticed about them, text by text.
Drawing upon a series of classical authors ranging from Homer and Sappho to Plato and Aristotle, Anastaplo examines issues relating to chance, art, nature, and divinity present in the artful works of philosophers and other thinkers.
As he has done in his earlier work, Anastaplo mines the great texts to help us discover who we are and what we should be. Some of the works used are familiar, others were once better known than they are now. The approach to all of them is freshand provocative, demonstrating the value of such texts in showing the reader what to look for and how to talk about matters that have always engaged thoughtful human beings.
These imaginative yet disciplined discussions of important texts of ancient Greek thought and of Raphael's The School of Athens should appeal to both the specialist and the general reader.
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