The Clouds - Softcover

Aristophanes

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1420927590 ISBN 13: 9781420927597

Publisher: Digireads.Com, 2006

Synopsis

The satire in this, one of the best known of all Aristophanes' comedies, is directed against the new schools of philosophy, or perhaps we should rather say dialectic, which had lately been introduced, mostly from abroad, at Athens. The doctrines held up to ridicule are those of the 'Sophists'-such men as Thrasymachus from Chalcedon in Bithynia, Gorgias from Leontini in Sicily, Protagoras from Abdera in Thrace, and other foreign scholars and rhetoricians who had flocked to Athens as the intellectual centre of the Hellenic world.-From the introduction to 'The Clouds' by Aristophanes.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

The career of Aristophanes as a writer of comedies lasted forty years, from 427 to c. 386. At least forty plays were attributed to him in antiquity, eleven of which survived into the Middle Ages and thus to our own day: the earliest of these eleven is Acharnians(425) and the last Wealth(388). Clouds was produced in 423, and was placed by the judges third of the three plays competing at the City Dionysia that year.

About the Author:

ARISTOPHANES, the most famous comic dramatist of ancient Greece, was born an Athenian citizen in about 445 B.C. Forty-four plays have been attributed to Aristophanes; eleven of these have survived. His plays are the only extant representatives of Greek Old Comedy, a dramatic form whose conventions made it inevitable that the author would comment on the political and social issues of fifth-century Athens. This Aristophanes did so well that Plato, asked by the tyrant of Syracuse for an analysis of Athenians, sent a copy of Aristophanes' plays in reply.
    
His earliest play, the Banqueters, won the second prize in 427 B.C. when the dramatist must have been less than eighteen years old, since, as he notes in the Clouds (423), he was too young to produce it in his own name. Another early play, the Babylonians, criticized the demagogue Cleon, who responded by subjecting Aristophanes to legal persecution, and as the author charges in the Acharnians, Cleon had "slanged, and lied, and slandered and betongued me . . . till I well nigh was done to death." Nevertheless, in the Knights (424), he renewed his attack on the popular Athenian leader and won first prize in that year's contest. Plutus (388) was the last of the author's plays to be produced in his lifetime.

About this edition

• Publisher: Digireads.Com
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 1420927590
• ISBN 13: 9781420927597
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 96