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“... and restrictive practice (so long as the tradition of live performance continues) may play a part. Aristophanes makes jokes about books, Plato insists on the values of the ear (the book, he remarks in the Phaedrus, is not interactive) – the culture of reading can be seen, even in the fifth century, as a fad of the avant-garde. This did not stop the IT ...”

“... to insist on the occasional shortcomings in scholarship. There certainly are a few odd slips. Aristophanes of Byzantium was an Alexandrian critic and should not be described as a Byzantine scholiast. Anaxagoras was not a contemporary of Solon – nor was Protagoras with whom he is apparently confused. If ‘Homeric resonances give to the discourse of ...”

“... lack of urban elegance. ‘Boeotian swine’ was a common insult in cosmopolitan Athens. Both Aristophanes and Plato lampooned the rustic Boeotian dialect, with its broad, flat ‘ah’ sounds in place of the Attic ‘ee’. (Theban names often end in -das, Epaminondas, rather than the more familiar Athenian -des.) But the greatest ignominy for Thebes was ...”

“... of all things bad or held it up as an ideal to which their own states should aspire. In Birds, Aristophanes created the verb lakonomanein, ‘to go Sparta-crazy’, suggesting that some Athenians in 414 BC so greatly admired Sparta that they were trying to look and act like Spartans. The contradictions have caused some to abandon the search for the real ...”

“... and elliptical billiard balls belong with a paraphernalia of satire and absurdity as timeless as Aristophanes. Beyond that, Savoy opera complicates definition and eludes judgment because it’s always on the point of turning into something else. The music works to humanise and historicise the text; the text works to dehumanise and dehistoricise the music ...”

“... you’re so naive.’ No expensive talk about Descartes, Marivaux, Lemprière and Aristophanes can procure a pardon for that sort of thing. Other reviewers may commend Thomas Harris for committing ‘not a single ugly or dead sentence’ but Amis finds enough of them to label Harris ‘a serial murderer of English sentences’ and Hannibal ...”

“... too frivolous intrinsically to ignite so great a war, it had already been trivialised further by Aristophanes in The Acharnians, when he claimed it was not a religious matter at all, but a squabble over courtesans, the proverbially squalid dispute of the law-courts and comedy. I doubt very much that Thucydides was unaware of the fun ...”

“... year for the world in general. For me, it was ameliorated by the publication of my commentary on Aristophanes’ Clouds and my book on Lysias, but aggravated by wear and tear on a vertebra.’ I find myself quite unable to decide whether this is a classic example of the kind of blind academic self-aggrandisement that is quite happy to put the outbreak of war ...”

“... victim) can only hope to understand heterosexuality through the myth of origins recounted by Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium, according to which those of us who are heterosexuals are descended from four-legged, four-armed hermaphrodites split in two by Zeus, so that ‘each half yearns for the half from which it has been severed.’ I think Tournier ...”

“... uncritical, they do suggest that she was coming to terms with her own ambivalence. ‘Not for all Aristophanes can we yield up our national freemasonry of wit … our family joke, our Jewish Humour,’ her article on the subject concludes; and Beckman is surely right to read this article’s celebration of the simultaneous laughter and pathos in Heine as a ...”

“... incorruptible honesty and genuine divinatory power. Of these, Delphi was by far the most notable: Aristophanes, who crucified the chrêsmologoi, never had a bad word for the Delphic oracle. The wealthy sixth-century Lydian monarch Croesus, after careful inquiries, was ready to invest gold by the hundredweight for guaranteed access to divine intentions: he ...”

“... and Catholic critics testify, that Lucian’s invective is most hard-hitting. Lucian ‘may follow Aristophanes in mocking the traditional Olympian gods,’ Hopkinson writes, ‘but he ignores popular contemporary cults.’ But two works in particular show Lucian fully aware of the religious world around him: Alexander, or the False Prophet (the model for ...”

“... medieval summary of (for all we know) Athenaeus’ paraphrase (c.ad 200); and the parody in Aristophanes suggests that the Athenian audience was supposed still to have some familiarity with its target. Nevertheless, of all Pindar’s epinicians only two are for Athenian victors, and those are among his slightest works, whereas 13, including some of his ...”

“... says, there is something pretty odd about an Athens that roared with laughter at the plays of Aristophanes putting on a long face and launching a prosecution for blasphemy; equally, there is something pretty odd about the city which had been amazingly restrained in its treatment of the oligarchy’s known supporters after the restoration of democracy in ...”

“... of the Agamemnon is an interesting experiment, and in ‘Balaustion’s Adventure’ and ‘Aristophanes’ Apology’ he used Greek poetry effectively; yet no one would claim that Browning had a special affinity with the Greeks. Arnold’s poetry has on the surface a strong Hellenic element. But neither ‘Sohrab and Rustum’ nor ‘Baldur Dead’ is ...”