Academic literature on the topic 'Aristophanes. eng'

Paracomedy: Appropriations of Comedy in Greek Tragedy is the first book that examines how ancient Greek tragedy engages with the genre of comedy. While scholars frequently study paratragedy (how Greek comedians satirize tragedy), this book investigates the previously overlooked practice of paracomedy: how Greek tragedians regularly appropriate elements from comedy such as costumes, scenes, language, characters, or plots. Drawing upon a wide variety of complete and fragmentary tragedies and comedies (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Rhinthon), this monograph demonstrates that para

In this chapter, Edith Hall reconsiders the figure of Cleon, the archetypal Athenian demagogue, with the aim of illuminating Aristophanes’ Knights, in which Cleon is represented by the Paphlagonian slave of Demos. When Cleon’s story is retold in modern histories of Athens or of democracy, it is almost always colored by one of our two (hostile) major sources, Aristophanes and Thucydides. Hall points out that at the end of the Knights the Paphlagonian slave is elevated to the office of beloved statesman. A whole tradition of scholarship—motivated, Hall thinks, in part by fear of the play’s radic

This book examines the impact that Athenian Old Comedy had on Greek writers of the Imperial era. It is generally acknowledged that Imperial-era Greeks responded to Athenian Old Comedy in one of two ways: either as a treasure trove of Atticisms, or as a genre defined by and repudiated for its aggressive humor. Worthy of further consideration, however, is how both approaches, and particularly the latter one that relegated Old Comedy to the fringes of the literary canon, led authors to engage with the ironic and self-reflexive humor of Aristophanes, Eupolis, and Cratinus. Authors ranging from ser

This chapter analyzes Euripides’s Orestes as a corrective paracomic response to the parodies and poetic criticisms from Aristophanes’s Women at the Thesmophoria. It suggests that Euripides reappropriates salient features from Aristophanes’s parodies of Euripides’s Helen, Palamedes, Andromeda, and Telephus in an attempt to show how Aristophanes’s views on tragic stagecraft are reductive. Various aspects of the plot, stagecraft, character, and symbolism of Orestes are interpreted as paracomic responses, including an escape plot with a large number of sword-bearing men, a metaphor in which Pylades is Orestes’s “oar blade,” a joke about the Gorgon’s head, and a threat to incinerate a hostage. Additionally, Euripides paracomically targets Aristophanes’s Peace and Clouds at key points at the beginning and end of the play. The chapter argues that Euripides employs paracomedy the way Aristophanes employs paratragedy—to establish his own genre’s primacy through a series of pointed contrasts with the other genre.

* e.g. because it has been obliterated by a correction, or because a page has been tom. (This convention does not apply to papyri: where the text of a papyrus is wholly lost or illegible at the relevant point, the papyrus is normally not mentioned at all in the apparatus.)...

This chapter draws on the fifth-century BCE uses of philosophos and cognates for two purposes: as corroboration for the coinage meaning set out in Chapter 3 and the connection to Pythagoreans set out in Chapter 4, and as description of the drift in meaning the term underwent across several generations of use. It focuses on six authors, each of whom use the term once: Herodotus, Thucydides, the Hippocratic author of On Ancient Medicine, Gorgias, Aristophanes, and Lysias. Burkert already referred to these authors in his observation that philosophos did not first mean “lacking wisdom” or “spectating the universe.” Treated, however, in their respective literary and rhetorical contexts, they provide significant information about the fifth-century BCE career of the idea of being philosophos. It appears that at the end of that century, the term sometimes loses its wry implication and names a quite specific mode of dialectic exchange about matters of abstract or broad significance.

Socrates' great educational innovation was in ascribing moral worth to the intellectual activity reflectively directed at one's own life. His concept of eudaimonia was so different from the ordinary that talking about it took on sometimes a paradoxical air, as in Apology 30b3. For him, reason is not a tool for attaining goals independently thought worthwhile; rather, rationality itself, expressed in the giving of reasons and the avoidance of contradictions, confers value to goals and opinions. Persons are reasonable, but obviously not the empirical human being. But education is aimed at the empirical man or woman and inevitably employs psychological means. How then is it possible that the result of education should grow out of the depths of each individual and be nevertheless valid for all individuals? In the Symposium, Plato gives Aristophanes the crucial move. Each of us is only half the whole person and we are moved by our desire for what we lack. In this context, to claim that the soul is immortal is to claim-at least-that the soul has a non-empirical dimension, that its real objects are not the objects of desire as such, and that a person's sensible life is not the true basis for the evaluation of his or her eudaimonia. However, in the soul which is not free from contradictions there is no advantage to right but unexamined options. There is in the life of the naïve just an insecurity which is not merely pragmatic. Even if a person never falters to the end of life, this is no more than moral luck. One is still guilty on the level of the logos, and liable to blame and punishment not for what one does, but for what one could have done.