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Aristophanes: Ecclesiazusae

with an Introduction, Translation and Commentary by A.H. Sommerstein~

Ecclesiazusae, probably produced in 391 BC, is at once a typically Aristophanic fantasy of gender inversion, obscenity and farce, the earliest surviving work in the western Utopian tradition, and the source of a blueprint for a communist society on which Plato may well have drawn in his Republic. This edition attempts to set the play, more closely than has usually been done, against the political background at the time of its production, when Athens has just spurned what probed to be the last opportunity to escape from a war it did not have the resources to fight, and to define the details of staging as precisely as the text will allow. Text with facing translation, commentary and notes240p (Aris & Phillips 1999)

Table of contents

Preface
References and Abbreviations
Introduction
Date and background
Gynaecocracy in Old Comedy
Praxagora's new society
Ecclesiazusae and the development of comedy
Staging
Select bibliography
Note on the Text
Parallel Greek Text and English Translation
Commentary

Biographical note

Alan H Sommerstein is Professor of Greek and Director of the Centre for Ancient Drama and its Reception, University of Nottingham; editor of the Aristophanes volumes in the Aris & Phillips Classical Texts series and of Aeschylus Eumenides (Cambridge, 1989); author of Aeschylean Tragedy (Bari, 1996) and of Greek Drama and Dramatists (London, 2002); co-editor of Tragedy, Comedy and the Polis (Bari, 1993), Shards from Kolonos: Studies in Sophoclean Fragments (Bari, forthcoming) and several other multi-author volumes. He is coordinating a collaborative edition of selected fragmentary plays of Sophocles for this series.

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