SOURCE: Dover, K. J. “Acharnians.” In Aristophanic Comedy, pp. 78-88. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972.

[In the following essay, Dover discusses pertinent aspects for consideration in productions of the Acharnians, including a discussion about the theme of war as it is addressed in the play.]

SYNOPSIS

The Peloponnesian War has lasted for nearly six years, and during that time the population of Attica has been concentrated within the perimeter of Athens, Peiraieus and the walls connecting the two. Their farms have been burned and their vines and olive-trees cut down by invading Peloponnesian armies each summer; but control of the seas and the coasts by Athenian naval power has not been impaired or even effectively challenged. In this situation an Athenian farmer, Dikaiopolis, has decided that he would rather be at peace than at war, and he has come to the assembly to make as much fuss as he can. He gets no comfort from the proceedings of the assembly. A certain Amphitheos, who declares himself immortal and of divine ancestry, announces that the gods have given him the job of making peace between Athens and Sparta; he is at once removed from the assembly by the police, and the assembly shows itself interested only in how to increase the scale of the war. An Athenian embassy sent to Persia twelve years earlier, with a stipend of two drachmai a day for each member, brings back an envoy (‘the King's Eye’) from the King of Persia and a promise (to which the envoy's pidgin-Greek gives the lie) of gold; Dikaiopolis, outraged, pretends to expose the envoy and his attendant eunuchs as Athenian impostors.¹ Another Athenian, Theoros, returns from a Thracian king with an army of mercenaries—who demonstrate, by stealing Dikaiopolis's lunch, that their only interest is in plunder. But in the meantime Dikaiopolis has commissioned Amphitheos to go off to Sparta and get him a peace-treaty on a purely private basis. Getting no satisfaction from the assembly, Dikaiopolis declares that he has felt a drop of rain; this is a ‘sign from heaven’ that continuation of the meeting is inauspicious, and it is accordingly adjourned. Now Amphitheos returns with sample treaties (spondái; cf. pp. 45f.); Dikaiopolis chooses the thirty-year treaty and goes off to his farm with the intention of celebrating the Rural Dionysia. Amphitheos runs off to escape pursuit by the old men of Akharnai, who have got wind of him on his way here; Akharnai, a thickly populated area north of Athens, had suffered particularly heavy damage in the first Peloponnesian invasion, and the Acharnians were for that reason determined to fight a war of revenge to a successful conclusion.

Dikaiopolis goes into a door in the skene (202), which thereupon represents his farm; up to that point, we had to imagine the scene as the Pnyx, where the assembly met in Athens, and the skene did not represent anything. The chorus of old Acharnians now arrives, singing an angry song, exhorting one another to the pursuit, lamenting the years which have made them slow, threatening the man who has dared to make peace. They hear Dikaiopolis calling, inside his house, for silence, and they back to one side. Out comes Dikaiopolis, organizing his household in a celebration of the Rural Dionysia; his daughter carries the basket of offerings, a slave carries the big model phallos, his wife watches from the roof, and he himself utters a prayer to Dionysos and a happy song to Phales. Suddenly the chorus attacks, stoning him.² The procession is broken up and the family flees indoors. Dikaiopolis does his best to keep the Acharnians at bay with argument, but this only angers them more; suddenly he turns the tables on them by producing a charcoal-basket which he threatens to ‘kill’ if they harm him. Charcoal-burning is one of the characteristic activities of Akharnai, so that the basket is the ‘fellow-demesman’ (334) of the Chorus; the threat to kill it is a parody of Euripides' Telephos, in which Telephos secured a hearing by seizing the infant son of Agamemnon as a hostage (cf. p. 164, on Thesm.).

Now the chorus has to agree to hear Dikaiopolis's case, but first he wants to dress up as a beggar, to exploit their compassion. This too is parody of Telephos, and Dikaiopolis visits Euripides to borrow the beggar's rags in which Telephos had appeared in the play. Euripides is rolled out of the house on the trolley which was used in tragedy to reveal interior scenes, and Dikaiopolis, adopting the tone of a wheedling, importunate beggar, secures from Euripides' store of ‘properties’ the complete rig-out of the disguised Telephos. So dressed, he delivers to the chorus a long speech in which he suggests that the war was begun for no good reason and that he has done the sensible thing in opting out of it; the speech combines parody of Euripides with parody of Herodotos and with a good deal of comic rhetoric. Half the chorus is convinced, the other half incensed; the two halves are on the point of coming to blows, when a new character appears—Lamakhos, invoked by the belligerent half-chorus. Lamakhos was a man who had made a name for himself as an elected general,³ and therefore a man who stood to gain by continuation and enlargement of the war. Dikaiopolis makes a fool of him, pretending to be frightened to death, then switching to coarse mockery, then fiercely indignant, and indignant on the chorus's behalf; people like Lamakhos get good jobs and high pay all over the place, but when have these decent, hard-working old Acharnians ever been sent on embassies? Considering how many Athenian generals were killed in action (as Lamakhos was, eleven years later), and considering that it is prudent to appoint to embassies those who will do the job best rather than those who could do with the money, the argument is senseless, but (like many senseless arguments) it works. Lamakhos is defeated and the whole Chorus is convinced.

The parabasis follows, the issue between hero and chorus being now resolved, and after the parabasis come two scenes illustrating the consequences of Dikaiopolis's creation of a private market in which he will trade with enemy nations. In the first scene a Megarian comes to sell his daughters, whom he disguises as piglets. Megara, Attica's small western neighbour, had been very hard hit by the war, but there is no suggestion in the play that it was not humane to hit so hard; cheerful and self-satisfied humour is extracted from the desperate hunger (751-763, 797-810) to which father and children have been reduced,⁴ and when an informer comes to make trouble about the presence of enemy goods on Attic soil Dikaiopolis drives him away for interference with his well-being, not with the Megarian's. In the second scene a Theban comes laden with all the good things to eat that Boeotia produces. He is in quite a different position from the Megarian, and cannot off hand think of anything he wants from Attica. Dikaiopolis has the bright idea of selling him an informer, a characteristic Attic product, and one such (named as Nikarkhos) arrives opportunely; he is packed up in shavings, like a vase, and exported to Boeotia.

Time has flown by; earlier in the play we saw Dikaiopolis celebrating the Rural Dionysia, and now it is time for another festival, the Anthesteria. Lamakhos sends Dikaiopolis some money for delicacies, but his messenger is sent away empty-handed. A farmer whose oxen have been taken by a Boeotian raiding party comes to beg for ‘a drop of peace’, but gets none; Dikaiopolis does not propose to share with his benighted fellow-citizens the advantages he has gained by his private initiative. A messenger from a newly-married bridegroom is similarly rejected, but a messenger from the bride, who comes with him, fares better; the bride ‘doesn't deserve to suffer from the war’ (1062),⁵ and Dikaiopolis gives her peace in the form of an ointment which (as if it had magical properties) she can put on her husband's penis to keep him safe from call-up.

Now a messenger comes for Lamakhos, bringing an order from the board of generals; he is to watch the passes over Parnes in the snow and guard against Boeotian raiders. A second messenger summons Dikaiopolis to a feast with the priest of Dionysos. The luckless and the lucky make their preparations simultaneously; Lamakhos's slave brings out the accoutrements of war, Dikaiopolis's brings out delicacies for a great hamper. Both go off their very different ways. After a choral interlude, we see them return: Lamakhos wounded and limping, supported by his slaves, Dikaiopolis drunk, randy and hilarious, supported by two girls. Lamakhos is taken off in one direction to the surgery, and the chorus follows Dikaiopolis off in the other direction, echoing his cries of triumphant victory.

PRODUCTION

The first scene of the play is potentially spectacular, which is not to say that it was actually produced in a spectacular manner. It represents a meeting of the assembly, and probably a group of mute performers entered as the prytánēs, the body of fifty which presided over the assembly, sitting, perhaps, on the step(s) forward of the skene, but it is not impossible that both in describing the behaviour of the prytanes (40-42) and in addressing them (56-58. 167f.) Dikaiopolis is actually looking and gesturing towards the audience, which is thus forced into playing a role as unexacting as it is appropriate.

The number of speaking characters in this scene and the timing of their exits and entrances pose an interesting problem. Prima facie the text points to the following:

(1) Dikaiopolis: on stage throughout, 1-203.

(2) The herald of the assembly: entrance 40-42, exit 173.

(3) Amphitheos: entrance 45, enforced exit 55; reappearance 129-132; entrance 175, exit 203.

(4) The Athenian envoy who has returned from Persia: entrance 64, exit 125.

(5) The ‘King's Eye’: entrance 94, exit 125.

(6) A certain Theoros, back from Thrace: entrance 134, exit 173.

No other scene in comedy needs six speaking actors, or even five; can we reduce the number needed for this scene to four? If we give the parts of Amphitheos, the envoy from Persia and Theoros all to one actor we can effect the reduction on paper, but it means a change from Amphitheos to envoy during 56-63, back to Amphitheos during 126-128, then to Theoros during line 133, and back to Amphitheos during 174. Changes of this speed are not credible, and it seems that we are necessarily committed to five actors. This can be managed if we treat the King's Eye as an extra who has only two lines to speak, one of pseudo-Persian and one of pidgin-Greek, and give the roles of the envoy and Theoros to one actor. The time available to him for the change of role can perhaps be extended from the interval 126-133 allocated above on prima facie grounds; at 110 Dikaiopolis exclaims

Get away! I'll put some questions to him (i.e. to the King's Eye) by myself (mónos, lit. ‘alone’).

If at this point he threatens the envoy with his stick and drives him out of the theatre with shouts and blows,⁶ the time available for a change of costume into the part of Theoros is extended to twenty-four lines.

In the last two hundred lines of the play we appear to be looking at two doors, one representing the house of Dikaiopolis and the other the house of Lamakhos. Each of the two men orders his own slave to ‘bring out’ (1097f., 1109, etc.) the items which he needs. If only one door is available, it does not consistently represent anybody's house, but only the point of transition from the property-store to the area in view of the audience (cf. p. 21); but in that case it is surprising that both before and after that scene clear (and, one would have thought, unnecessary) reference is made to Lamakhos's house. In 1071, when the messenger arrives to give Lamakhos the order to guard the Parnes passes, Lamakhos's first words, in tragic style, are:

Who makes resound the palace faced with bronze?

And when Lamakhos returns wounded, he is preceded by a servant who declaims, also in tragic style (1174f.):

O servitors of Lamakhos's house,
heat water, water!—in a casserole.

Again, almost the last words of Lamakhos after his return are (1222f.):

Carry me out from home
to Pittakos's surgery
with hands of healing.

Thus if one door is in use during the frantic scene of preparation, we are given every encouragement, on either side of that scene, to identify it as Lamakhos's door. Yet before that—before Lamakhos's reference to his ‘palace faced with bronze’—it seems to be identified as Dikaiopolis's door, behind which great culinary activity is going on; the chorus says nothing to suggest that it sees the food being cooked, but twice refers (1015, 1042) to hearing Dikaiopolis's orders as he dispenses to his slaves the delicacies bought from the Theban. All this points to the use of two doors, one of them consistently Dikaiopolis's house from 202 to the end of the play, the other Euripides' from 395 to 479 and Lamakhos's from 573 to the end; and … there is an even stronger case for two doors in Clouds, Peace and Women in Assembly. But the evidence bearing upon the staging of comedy is rarely free of complications and uncertainties, and the present case is no exception. When Dikaiopolis acquires a splendid Boeotian eel from the Theban, he says (887-894):

Servitors, bring the oven and the fan out here to me. Look, boys, upon the noblest of eels—at last she's come, after five years, and how we've missed her! Salute her, children; and I'll give you charcoal in honour of this guest. Well, take her in. Never may I be parted, even death, from you (sc. the eel) in your garnishing of beetroot!⁷

Why does he ask for the oven to be brought out, as if to cook the eel on the spot, and then send the eel indoors? It could plausibly be argued that this is a preparation for all the cooking that is to come later; that the cooking will all be done outside, in and around the oven brought out at 888; and that the door in the skene will not thereafter represent Dikaiopolis's house, but alternately Lamakhos's and the indeterminate ‘source of properties’. But if that is the poet's purpose, why does he make Dikaiopolis tell a slave to ‘take in’ the eel? I do not think that a wholly satisfactory inscenation of Acharnians has yet been propounded; to come off the fence in favour of one door or two—so far as this play is concerned—is possible only if we shut our eyes to at least one of the relevant data and thus conceal from ourselves the nature of the problems with which the study of Aristophanic comedy habitually confronts us.⁸

PEACE AND WAR

Neither in Acharnians nor anywhere else in Aristophanes does the question of ‘pacifism’ arise, if by that term we mean the willingness to endure, or to see inflicted upon others, any suffering whatsoever in preference to committing the sin of homicide. The issue which does arise is the utility of continuing war for uncertain and marginal gain when it is possible to make peace at a trivial cost. Aristophanes and his audience were perfectly aware that on the whole peace is more enjoyable than war, but there is no sign that anyone, except some right-wing extremists who would have accepted alien rule if it maintained their own class in power within Athens, would have been willing to sacrifice for the sake of peace the wealth and dominant position which Athens derived from her rule over the Aegean islands and the coastal cities of Asia Minor. In the closing scene of Knights Demos (the personification of the Athenian people) gladly accepts a thirty-year peace-treaty, but the chorus at the beginning of the scene has hailed him as ‘monarch of Greece and of this land’ (1330) and as ‘king of the Greeks’ (1333).

A speaker in the introductory portion of Plato's Laws is made to say (626a):

What most men call peace is only a word; in fact there exists by nature a state of unproclaimed war between every city and every other city.

Although by no means all Greeks would have put the matter so incompromisingly, they were more inclined than we are to regard war as part of the fabric of nature, on a par with bad weather. Thucydides (iv. 64.3) represents a Syracusan in 424 as trying to persuade all the Greek states of Sicily to ward off the threat of Athenian intervention:

We shall have our wars, no doubt, from time to time, and we'll make peace again by discussions among ourselves; but if we are wise we shall combine to repel alien attack.

Between small and equally-matched cities, especially in the less sophisticated parts of the Greek world, war was something of a seasonal occupation. It could be more serious; from time to time a city would destroy one of its smaller neighbours, killing the adult male population, selling the rest into slavery, and razing the city to the ground. This was one of the facts of life which Aristophanes and his audience recognised, but in the early years of the Peloponnesian War it would not have occurred to many of them that there could be any real danger of such a fate to a city as large and powerful as Athens. In any case, the turning of the other cheek did not occupy a conspicuous place in the moral scheme of Greek society; it was manly to return evil for evil, and pusillanimous to choose safety in preference to glory. Three generations later it is remarkable to observe the great emphasis laid by Demosthenes, in justifying the foreign policy which he had advocated, on that kind of national honour which is maintained by a readiness to fight. One cannot accuse the Athenians of romanticizing war from a safe distance; they knew from their own experience what hacking and piercing with sharp metal was like.

During 432 and the winter of 432/1, when Sparta's allies prodded her into beginning hostilities against Athens, one of the issues was the ‘Megarian Decree’, a measure by which the Athenians, in retaliation for what they considered unfriendly behaviour on the part of Megara, debarred Megarians from access to Athens and the states of the Athenian empire.⁹ At one point during that winter the Spartans went so far as to say that ‘if the Athenians repealed the Megarian Decree there would be no war’ (Thucydides i.139.1). This demand created in some quarters at Athens a feeling that repeal was a reasonable price to pay for the maintenance of peace. Perikles insisted that if Athens yielded to Sparta on this issue she would suffer a lasting moral defeat and more serious demands would follow. His advice prevailed, but the minority which thought the decree not worth a war did not necessarily change its mind; in the second summer of the war, when Athens had been stricken by the unforeseen disaster of the plague, there was a temporary majority in favour of negotiations for peace, and in popular tradition Perikles and the Megarian Decree became firmly established as ‘the cause’ of the war. This is to be seen not only in Acharnians 509-556 and Peace 603-614 but also in our evidence for the lost Dionysalexandros of Kratinos, which satirized Perikles as ‘having brought the war upon Athens’ (cf. p. 217) and in a fourth-century view (Andokides iii. 8) that the war broke out in 431 ‘because of the Megarians’.¹⁰ If, therefore, it were possible to translate Dikaiopolis's speech to the chorus into the terminology of a judiciously expressed political tract, it would amount to this: courage in the interests of one's own city is admirable, and it is to be hoped that Sparta will suffer an earthquake which will pay her back for the damage she has done to Attica, but Athens was too hasty in embarking on the present war over an unimportant issue, and it would be both agreeable and safe to try to stop fighting now. Reasonableness, sympathy, understanding and magnanimity were all recognized by the Greeks as virtues, and it would not have been difficult in 425 to argue that these standards of behaviour indicated peace negotiations rather than war à outrance. To make such a case it might have been necessary to retain at least one of the evasions of the speech itself (535-539):

Then the Megarians … asked the Spartans that the decree should be repealed; and we were not willing, although they asked repeatedly. (Who asked whom repeatedly? The Megarians the Spartans, or the Spartans us?)

But what is most striking is how much would have to be changed in translating from humorous to serious level. In order to justify his private treaty to the chorus Dikaiopolis borrows rags from Euripides, dresses himself up like Euripides' tragic hero Telephos, and then delivers a speech which begins and ends as a close parody of Telephos's famous speech, thus directing our attention away from the content of the argument to the incongruous humour of parody. Moreover, inside the parody of tragedy lies another parody; Herodotos's history of the conflict between Greeks and Persians, which was put into circulation three or four years before Acharnians, opens with myths (Io, Medea, Helen) of the seizure of European women by Asiatics and Asiatic women by Europeans, and it is difficult not to see an allusion to Herodotos in Ach. 524-529:

Some young men who'd had too much to drink went off to Megara and kidnapped the prostitute Simaitha. This hurt the Megarians and really roused them, so in retaliation they kidnapped two of Aspasia's prostitutes. So that was how the war burst on the whole Greek world, all from three whores.¹¹

In Peace 603-614, which shares with Dikaiopolis's speech the treatment of the Megarian Decree as the final blow to peace, the nature of the events leading up to it is entirely different, so that we can hardly treat the story of the kidnappings as the standard popular version of the causes of the war. Aristophanes could conceivably expect us to perceive and assess a serious argument for peace wrapped in a double layer of amusing parody, but whether he did expect this depends on our interpretation of the framework into which the parody is fitted.

It cannot be too strongly emphasized that Dikaiopolis does not concern himself even with the interests of his own city, let alone those of the Greek world; in this respect he is strikingly different from Trygaios in Peace. He wants his own comfort and pleasure, and escapes by magical means from his obligations as a citizen subject to the rule of the sovereign assembly and its elected officers. It is not easy to read into his behaviour the implication that Athens would be a better and safer place if everyone else followed his example, for not only does he reject the idea of sharing the benefits of peace with anyone else, he operates on a supernatural level, exempt from the operation of real causes and effects, to which others cannot follow him simply by a wish or a decision to do so. Having got his peace, he does not think of going out to preach to the Acharnians, or to anyone else; it is they who pursue him, intent on punishing him, and everything that he says to them is designed in one way or another to save him from that punishment. One way is plausible argument; another is trickery, hence the beggar-costume and the Euripidean style (440-444); and a third is confident, noisy bluster. Only half the chorus is persuaded by his speech; what wins over the other half is his outrageous mockery of Lamakhos and his successful arousal of old men's prejudices against distinguished younger men.

In sum: Acharnians is not a pill of political advice thickly sugared with humour, but a fantasy of total selfishness, exploiting, among much else, political views and arguments which existed at all levels, from the most casual grumbling to the most thoughtful analysis, as ingredients of the contemporary situation.

Notes

1. It is not necessary to believe that a particular embassy to Persia is satirized in this scene, still less that one had actually been sent in 437 and had only just returned. The possibility of getting money from the King of Persia was seriously considered by both sides, but it is in keeping with Dikaiopolis's attitude that he should regard any exploration of this possibility as a misdirected waste of public money, profiting only those who were sent as ambassadors. The passage also exploits humorously the vast scale of the Persian Empire and the stories about it propagated in Herodotos.

2. According to tradition, some individuals whose impiety or treachery was felt too monstrous for ordinary execution had been stoned to death; cf. Demosthenes xviii 204 on a certain Kyrsilos, who had advocated surrender to the Persians in 480.

3. We should not imagine Lamakhos as the red-faced white-moustached ‘colonel’ of modern mythology; Dikaiopolis calls him a young man (601), and we should think of him as the kind of man who becomes a divisional commander before he is forty.

4. The only reference in comedy to the Athenian massacre and enslavement of the inhabitants of Melos in 416 is Birds 186, where Peisetairos promises the hoopoe that the birds will ‘destroy the gods with a Melian hunger’, i.e. starve them out.

5. The text says tô polémō t' ouk aksíā, ‘and not deserving of the war’; it is not uncommonly emended to … aitíā, ‘and not responsible for the war’.

6. It must be admitted that a similar line in Thesm. 626 is no more than a command to stand aside, for the character so addressed is required nine lines later.

7. The oddities of the English translation reflect paratragic words and phrases in the original.

8. At the beginning of the scene of preparation, according to the manuscript text, Dikaiopolis says to his slave sýnkl[UNK]ie, which would normally mean ‘shut up the house’; but a different interpretation of the word is possible, and so is an emendation sýnklāe, which would be addressed to Lamakhos and would have a completely different meaning, consonant with the preceding line.

9. The extent and nature and purpose of the debarment are all controversial, but the details of the controversy are not relevant to the present discussion.

10. Thucydides, who lived through the Peloponnesian War and wrote a history of it, regarded it as all one war from 431 to 404, but this was not the prevailing view at the time or for quite a long time afterwards. The fourth-century orators thought of the ten years' war from 431 to 421 as distinct from the subsequent fighting.

11. See also note 1 above on Herodotos.

Select Bibliography

This bibliography includes the principal editions and commentaries, some modern translations, standard works, and a few recent articles and monographs. References already given in footnotes are not repeated here.

Abbreviations: comm(entary), ed(ition), f(oot)n(otes), intr(oduction), tr(anslation).

A. General

Cantarella, R., intr., ed., Italian tr., fn. (Milan, 1949-1964).

Coulon, V., intr., ed., fn., Van Daele, H., French tr. (Paris, 1923-1930).

Hall, F. W. and Geldart, W. M., ed. (Oxford, vol. i [ed. 2] 1906, vol. ii 1907).

Rogers, B. B., intr., ed., English tr., comm. (London, 1902-1915).

———, intr., ed., English tr. (London, 1924).

Van Leeuwen, J., Latin intr., ed., Latin comm. (Leyden, 1896-1909).

Barrett, D., English tr. of Wasps, Women at the Thesmophoria (‘The Poet and the Women’) and Frogs (Harmondsworth, 1964).

Dickinson, P., English tr. (Oxford, 1970).

Fitts, D., English tr. of Lysistrata, Frogs, Birds and Women at the Thesmophoria (‘Ladies' Day’) (New York, 1962).

Seeger, L., revised by H.-J. Newiger and P. Rau, German tr. (Munich, 1968).

Willems, A., French tr., fn. (Paris and Brussels, 1919).

Arnott, P. D., Greek Scenic Conventions in the Fifth Century B.C. (Oxford, 1962).

Bieber, M. History of the Greek and Roman Theater (Princeton, ed. 2 1961).

Boudreaux, P., Le Texte d'Aristophane et ses commentateurs (Paris, 1919).

Couat, A., Aristophane et l'ancienne comédie attique (Paris, 1892).

Croiset, M., Aristophanes and the Political Parties at Athens, translated by J. Loeb (London, 1909).

Dale, A. M., Collected Papers (Cambridge, 1969), especially Chapters 3, 8-9, 11, 14-15, 19-25.

Dover, K. J., ‘Greek Comedy’, Fifty Years (and Twelve) of Classical Scholarship (Oxford, 1968), 123-158.

Ehrenberg, V., The People of Aristophanes (Oxford, ed. 2 1951).

Fraenkel, E., Beobachtungen zu Aristophanes (Rome, 1962).

Gelzer, T., Der epirrhematische Agon bei Aristophanes (Munich, 1960).

Gomme, A. W., More Essays in Greek History and Literature (Oxford, 1962), Chapter v, ‘Aristophanes and Politics’.

Grene, D., ‘The Comic Technique of Aristophanes’, Hermathena l (1937), 87-125.

Handel, P., Formen und Darstellungsweisen in der aristophanischen Komödie (Heidelberg, 1963).

Jernigan, C. C., Incongruity in Aristophanes (Menasha, Wis., 1939).

Kassies, W., Aristophanes' Traditionalisme (Amsterdam, 1963).

Koch, K. D., Kritische Idee und komisches Thema: Untersuchungen zur Dramaturgie und zum Ethos der aristophanischen Komödie (Bremen, 1965).

Lesky, A., History of Greek Literature, translated by J. Willis and C. J. de Heer (London, 1966).

Lever, K., The Art of Greek Comedy (London, 1956).

Lord, L. E., Aristophanes: his Plays and his Influence (London, 1925).

Mazon, P., Essai sur la composition des comédies d' Aristophane (Paris, 1904).

Murray, G., Aristophanes (Oxford, 1933).

Newiger, H.-J., Metapher und Allegorie: Studien zu Aristophanes (Munich, 1957).

Norwood, G., Greek Comedy (London, 1931).

Pickard-Cambridge, A., Dithyramb, Tragedy and Comedy, ed. 2, revised by T. B. L. Webster (Oxford, 1962).

———, The Dramatic Festivals of Athens, ed. 2, revised by John Gould and D. M. Lewis (Oxford, 1968).

———, The Theatre of Dionysus at Athens (Oxford, 1946).

Rau, P., Paratragodia: Untersuchung einer komischen Form des Aristophanes (Munich, 1967).

Russo, C. F., Aristofane: autore di teatro (Florence, 1962).

Schmid, W., Geschichte der griechischen Literatur, Part 1, Vol. iv (Munich, 1946).

Seel, O., Aristophanes oder Versuch über die Komödie (Stuttgart, 1960).

Sifakis, G. M., Parabasis and Animal Choruses (London, 1971).

Steiger, H., ‘Die Groteske und Burleske bei Aristophanes’ Philologus lxxxix (1934), 161-184, 275-285, 416-432.

Süss, W., Aristophanes und die Nachwelt (Leipzig, 1911).

———, ‘Scheinbare und wirkliche Inkongruenzen in den Dramen des Aristophanes’, Rheinisches Museum xcvii (1954), 115-159, 229-254, 289-316.

Taillardat, J., Les Images d' Aristophane: études de langue et de style (Paris, revised ed. 1965).

Van Leeuwen J., Prolegomena ad Aristophanem (Leyden, 1908).

Webster, T. B. L., Greek Theatre Production (London, 1956).

———, Studies in Later Greek Comedy (Manchester, 1953).

Webster, T. B. L., Studies in Menander (Manchester, ed. 2 1960).

———, The Greek Chorus (London, 1970).

Whitman, C. H., Aristophanes and the Comic Hero (Cambridge, Mass., 1964).

B. Individual Plays

Acharnians

Forrest, W. G. G. ‘Aristophanes’ Acharnians', Phoenix (Toronto) xvii (1963), 1-12.

Merry, W. W., intr., ed., comm. (Oxford, ed. 5 1901).

Parker, D., English tr. (Ann Arbor, 1961).

Rennie, W. intr., ed., comm. (London, 1909).

Starkie, W. J. M., intr., ed., English tr., comm. (London, 1909).