Text And Notes

PEACE
Introduction
Text And Notes

LYSISTRATA
Introduction
Text And Notes

THE CLOUDS
Introduction
Text And Notes

INDEX

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Translator's Foreword

Perhaps the first thing to strike us--paradoxical as it may sound to say
so--about the Athenian 'Old Comedy' is its _modernness_. Of its very
nature, satiric drama comes later than Epic and Lyric poetry, Tragedy or
History; Aristophanes follows Homer and Simonides, Sophocles and
Thucydides. Of its essence, it is free from many of the conventions and
restraining influences of earlier forms of literature, and enjoys much of
the liberty of choice of subject and licence of method that marks
present-day conditions of literary production both on and off the stage.
Its very existence presupposes a fuller and bolder intellectual life, a
more advanced and complex city civilization, a keener taste and livelier