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The Acharnians

Aristophanes

Book Overview: 

Loaded with cryptic, nearly indecipherable inside jokes and double entendres, this early comedy of Aristophanes has a simple, anti-war premise that resounds down the centuries. On flimsy pretexts, greedy politicians have embroiled the nation of Athens in war after war after war. Dicæopolis is Everyman, an ordinary, plain-speaking citizen fed up with the bumbling, belligerence, and insincerity of the professional leaders. He decides on a whim to make a separate peace with Sparta all by himself, returning with a treaty good for thirty years. Envious of the good deal he has made and of the profit he sees from it, other Athenians try to buy packets of his peace from him, with no success. Puffed up with his own cleverness, Dicæopolis spends the final scenes of the play ridiculing the muscle-brained neanderthal General Lamachus for faux patriotism and comic chest-beating heroism.

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Book Excerpt: 
. . .Sitalces.(1) f(1) King of Thrace. THEORUS I am here. DICAEOPOLIS Another humbug! THEORUS We should not have remained long in Thrace... DICAEOPOLIS Forsooth, no, if you had not been well paid. THEORUS ...if the country had not been covered with snow; the rivers were ice-bound at the time that Theognis(1) brought out his tragedy here; during the whole of that time I was holding my own with Sitalces, cup in hand; and, in truth, he adored you to such a degree, that he wrote on the walls, "How beautiful are the Athenians!" His son, to whom we gave the freedom of the city, burned with desire to come here and eat chitterlings at the feast of the Apaturia;(2) he prayed his father to come to the aid of his new country and Sitalces swore on his goblet that he would succour us with such a host that the Athenians would exclaim, "What a cloud of grasshoppers!" f(1) The tragic poet. f(2) A feast lasting three days and celebrated during the . . . Read More

Community Reviews

o critică amuzantă a războiului peloponesiac și nevoia de pace, chiar una privată :)
și o traducere foarte bună de liviu franga.

The judgmental paragons who seek attention,
the dubious folks of ill intention,

will make all shorts of faulty claims
but truth prevails and brakes all chains:

Democracy and Peace match well,
without them, everything goes to Hell!

Avoid the demagogues, they always lie
especially the ones who prophesy!

Dic

The more I think about it, the more I think The Acharnians is virtually the Greek equivalent of The Forever War.

Both of these fictional works come from authors writing in the political climate of national war, at a point in the war where the people are getting tired of fighting. Just as The Forever

Translated, introduced and annotated by Alan H. Sommerstein. This play is about a farmer, Dikaiopolis, who in the midst of war, failed peace initiatives and crushing embargoes, makes his own personal thirty-years' peace with Sparta. It's got the usual Aristophanes jabs at his contemporaries: warmong

Switching from tragedy to comedy is both a relief and a shock. After reading the works of tragedians such as Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, I finally decided to read the works of the comedian, Aristophanes. I was getting kind of tired of the soap-opera-ness of tragedy, so I figured that a bit

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