David B. Barrett - Aristophanes: The Birds and Other Plays

(Alan H. Sommerstein)

(Alan H. Sommerstein)

(David Barrett)

(translated by Alan H. Sommerstein)

(translated by Alan H. Sommerstein)

(translated by David Barrett)

(translated by David Barrett)

(translated by Alan H. Sommerstein)

Aristophanes was active as a writer of comedies at Athens from 427 to about 386 B.C.; forty of his plays were known to ancient scholars, and eleven of these have come down to us: The Acharnians (425), The Knights (424), The Clouds (a partly revised version of a play produced in 423), The Wasps (422), Peace (421), The Birds (414), Lysistrata and The Poet and the Women (Thesmophoriazusae) (411), The Frogs (405), The Assemblywomen (Ecclesiazusae) (probably 391), and Wealth (Plutus) (388).

We know very little of the man except through his work. He does not seem to have taken any direct part in politics: he was probably one of the 500 Councillors for a year in the 390s, but this was an office it was hard to avoid. His comedies, though, were highly political, as comedy was then expected to be, and twice landed him in court (see the Introduction to The Knights). From Platos Symposium, written not long after Aristophanes death, we get an impression of him as a pleasure-loving man, frivolous on the surface but serious underneath a little like some of his heroes.

Comedies were produced once only, competitively, at two annual festivals, before an open-air audience of some 14,000 (of all ages, but predominantly male); thereafter (apart from occasional re-productions at theatres in outlying parts of Attica) they existed only as written texts. The stage directions in this translation are our own; we hope they are a fair approximation to Aristophanes or his producers instructions to actors and chorus, but in many cases anything like certainty is impossible.

With trivial exceptions, Aristophanes comedies are written wholly in verse. This is of three main types: the six-foot iambic metre of ordinary spoken dialogue; various eight-foot metres (iambic, trochaic, anapaestic), delivered in a more strictly rhythmical manner to musical accompaniment, which predominate in two types of scene of capital importance in Aristophanic drama the scene of physical and/or verbal conflict (agon) in which the main issue of the play is often decided, and the address by the chorus to the audience (parabasis); and sung lyrics, performed (with dancing) mainly by the chorus but also by some of the principals. We have followed the pattern of our previous translations, presenting the spoken scenes as prose, the lyrics generally as verse (and in production they certainly ought to be sung), and the recitative passages of the original as one or the other depending on the character of the scene.

A.H.S.

In Aristophanes time literary criticism was in its infancy; indeed, his own Frogs ranks among its earliest monuments. It is not therefore surprising that we have very little in the way of contemporary critical appraisal of Aristophanes, most of what usually passes under that name being either the small change of comic insult, or later romance about Plato.

From an older contemporary of Aristophanes, the comic poet Cratinus (c. 490c. 420 B.C.), we have one precious word. Cratinus characterized a certain type of poet as a hair-splitting master of niceties, a Euripidaristophanist. In other words, he asserted that Aristophanes resembled Euripides in his concern for verbal precision and dexterity (dexiots, in Aristophanes always a term of praise) in preference to the bolder, rougher strokes typical of those who, like Cratinus himself, had grown up under the spell of Aeschylus. Aristophanes himself was quite aware of this, but he drew a sharp distinction between Euripidean technique and Euripidean thought; or, as he put it in his lost play