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“... vermin, which soon find out an Englishman, are exactly described in the graphic accounts given by Aristophanes of similar sufferings in Greek houses of old.’ Recapturing this world of antiquity was not, of course, without its hazards and difficulties, and the Handbook tried to demonstrate its own indispensability with some very lurid warnings about what ...”

“... as it threw up, with bewildering richness, such disparate characters as Socrates, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Alcibiades and the sculptor Pheidias. The virtues of creative and morally justified imperialism had a peculiar attraction for a governing class that was increasingly, as the 20th century advanced, facing challenges to its own rule. But by 1992, when ...”

“... less well with the old guard, for whom rash and dangerous ventures abroad were anathema. They (as Aristophanes’ comedies make all too clear) regarded men like Cleon as vulgar lower-class tradesmen. The misfortunes of war and the consequent diminution of Periclean-style prestige, had, after Pericles’ death, not only helped men like Cleon, but also much ...”

“... Moral Philosophy (1498). Thucydides’ Histories (1502), Herodotus’ Histories (1502). Plays by Aristophanes (1498), Sophocles (1502), Euripides (1503). The Iliad and the Odyssey (1504). The works of the Greek orators (Demosthenes in 1504, anthologies in 1513). The complete works of Plato (1513). He was so busy that he hung a sign on his door: ‘Whoever ...”

“... propriety were given, as culturally authoritative reading matter, the extravagant indecencies of Aristophanes and Martial. Horace, who would have been ‘core curriculum’ because of the purity of his Augustan Latin, is far from pure in content; there are many lines in Horace extolling Stoic integrity, but still more on the Epicurean pleasures, drinking and ...”

“... of stations.’ She chose not to gloss the message on the weighing machine, nor the quotation from Aristophanes’ The Frogs (in a translation by Harrison’s friend and colleague Gilbert Murray). ‘Brekekekek co-ax co-ax’ is what Dionysus yells to the frogs (aka the French) to shut them up while Charon ferries him across to Hades – a detail I learned not ...”

“... latter became something of a theme, reaching its apotheosis in the illustrations to Lysistrata, Aristophanes’ comedy about the Athenian women’s sex strike. As Clare Barlow writes in her catalogue essay (Tate, £25), Beardsley’s work includes ‘a striking range of sexual practices’, as well as fantastic, sometimes nightmarish figures of ...”

“... oaths and rather more explicit bodily language is widespread in ancient comedy. At the start of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata the women solemnly swear (over a wine flagon) to abstain from sex until their men make peace. The Spartan woman Lampito repeatedly emphasises her assertions with an oath by Castor and Pollux. ‘By the twin gods,’ she says, ‘it’s ...”

“... presence in the society he describes. Yes, he did banish Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes – the greatest names of Greek literature. But not because they were poets. He banished them because they produced the wrong sort of poetry. To rebut Plato’s critique of poetry, what is needed is not a defence of poetry, but a defence of the ...”

“... the stage image of women along with the way female characters expressed themselves in music. In Aristophanes’ comedy Frogs (the first documented response to Euripides), Aeschylus complains that Euripides ‘picked up Cretan monodies’ and dragged gamous (‘marriages, fucking’) into tragedy. ‘Cretan monodies’, whatever they are, go with ...”

“... A kindred spirit – a perfect partner to complete and mirror her, like the missing half of Aristophanes’ divided egg – was something Sinedu seems to have believed, at one point, she had found in Trang. Through her single act of violence, Sinedu’s reality became the ultimate one, linking the two girls through death in a common fate, so that in ...”

“... of the Roman Empire: in the revolutionary century, he turned to the Athens of Socrates, Plato and Aristophanes – ‘the long Greek twilight’ – whose times called upon them to be critics. But there was a difficulty: Without faith in Man, the Apollo Belvedere is no longer a fit model. Instead of proclaiming a common ideology for an upper-class world in ...”

“... out of the bag; when women get together, they must have a mind to drink or sex (so the husbands in Aristophanes, and their blood brother, King Pentheus in the Bacchae); ‘she had her face made up, although her brother was not yet a month dead’ (so the cuckold in Lysias). There is the long-enduring stereotype of the shrew, after Hipponax: ‘You get two good ...”

“... Greece were the two most common foci for this nostalgia, and Lawrence was avid for both. He read Aristophanes in the desert, and his last book was a translation of the Odyssey. But it was the Middle Ages (or his idea of them) that really got to him. He read Malory’s Morte D’Arthur repeatedly, together with Spenser, William Morris’s Sigurd the ...”

“... which filled many gaps by inferring the life from the plays, and taking seriously the jokes that Aristophanes and others had made about the Poet of Rags and his mother the greengrocer. For further intimacy with the illustrious dead, nothing served so well as their private letters. Fraudsters or funsters duly invented the correspondence of Alexander with the ...”