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“...  Listen to Emily Wilson discuss Aristophanes with Thomas Jones on Among the Ancients, part of the LRB's Close Readings podcast. Find out more here.When​ Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion released ‘WAP’ in August 2020, ‘conservative’ commentators such as Tucker Carlson expressed outrage that the song might corrupt ‘your granddaughters’; Alyssa Rosenberg in the Washington Post celebrated it as an ‘ode to female sexual pleasure ...”

“... A new edition of Aristophanes’ Acharnians, by S. Douglas Olson, was published recently (Oxford, £65), in time for George Bush not to read it before he blunders into Iraq. Aristophanes’ earliest surviving comedy was first performed in 425 BC, six years into the Peloponnesian War ...”

“... of entertaining one another with speeches in praise of love. Phaidros, Pausanias, Eryximachos, Aristophanes and Agathon have spoken; Sokrates is just subsiding to applause when a knock comes at the door. Alkibiades blunders in, very loud, very drunk and covered in garlands. Boisterous confusion follows. When they catch sight of one another Alkibiades and ...”

“... enjoyed was seeing the wealthy, well-born and powerful held up to ridicule. Playwrights such as Aristophanes were not slow to oblige. It would be surprising if the aristocratic tradition of formalised pederasty did not come in for some heavy-handed mockery, and in Aristophanes’ Knights (which won first prize in ...”

“... as it may, we can perceive at least a skirmish of lifestyles, of snobberies and anti-snobberies. Aristophanes paints a paradigm fantasy in Wasps. The little fella, whose income and enjoyment came from sitting on the citizen jury at twopence a day, gets transformed into a socialite and joins the ton for another aristocratic inheritance, the formal dinner ...”

“... oral exchanges. Jokes seem quickly to have become something of an industry. Already in Aristophanes’ Wasps the fashionable son recommends that his vulgar father memorise the jokes he hears at the symposium so that when he gets into drunken brawls on the way home he can persuade his victims to laugh it off instead of suing for damages. He is ...”

“... but the comic side of the classics has been strangely neglected. On the face of it, Muldoon and Aristophanes looks like a marriage made, if not in heaven at least in cloud-cuckooland. The Birds feathers its nest with representatives of such exotic species as the Super-grouse, the Ombridsman and the frigg-it-bird as well as those Muldoon familiars, the ...”

“... now have them: Zenodotus of Ephesus, the first librarian of the Museum of Alexandria, fl. 280 BCE; Aristophanes of Byzantium, its fourth librarian; and the sixth librarian and most important Homeric scholar of the three, Aristarchus of Samothrace. Surviving bits of Homer on earlier papyri as well as Homer citations by earlier authors show that there were large ...”

“... however, appear for the most part to have been content with heterosexual love. In the Symposium Aristophanes tells the company a myth which seems to throw much light on attitudes to sex in Plato’s time. Human beings were originally twice as large as they are now, and had four arms, four legs, two faces and two sets of genitals. Then Zeus cut them in ...”

“... class="highlight-term">Aristophanes Well, Anthony, by now the secret’s out Of what this book is really All About. The heavyweights have weighed in in your praise With mighty line and lapidary phrase Whereby both Life and Death are shown to be Imbued with enigmatic majesty. To ...”

“... this can be culture-specific, a response to current, lamentable times. It’s the running joke of Aristophanes’ Frogs – produced after Athens’s crushing defeats in the Peloponnesian War and staged in a city in such dire financial straits that impresarios couldn’t afford suitable dress for their choruses – that a trip to the underworld is ...”

“... as if God could die and leave a will, as the none too bright Heracles imagines Zeus might do in Aristophanes’ Birds. However, although Adams discusses Jerome, Augustine and other Christian authors intermittently, there is no general consideration of the effect on the Latin spoken by Christians of subliterary Greek, itself subject to Hebrew or Aramaic ...”

“... as a school text is one reason so much of it is still extant: 21 plays, compared to only 11 by Aristophanes. Roman comedy does, of course, emerge from a particular historical moment. But enjoyment of it does not require any specific knowledge of history or politics. Somebody who reads Plautus without knowing anything about Rome’s wars with Carthage will ...”