Aristophanes tumbles out of an ore cart and onto the stage. His white robe is dirty and disheveled. He is bald, really bald, the classicist in me notices before I even realize what is happening. And then Aristophanes starts venting: the workers drilling the new Athenian metro lines have hit his grave and disturbed his centuries-long rest. What do the Greeks want from him? What more can they take!? They’ve abused his plays so much and they continue to do so every summer, without ever paying him a single obol in copyright money. He’d be rich otherwise, as rich as...

In his fiery attack Voltaire accused Aristophanes of complicity in the death of Socrates, the model of virtue and critical thinking for the “Age of Rationality.” The comic poet had derided Socrates as a greedy sophist, atheist, and petty thief in hisClouds, which earned only a third prize at the 423 B.C.E. festival of the Great Dionysia.¹ Moreover, Athenian democratic authorities had wrongfully sanctioned this production. Not even Plutarch had been harsh enough in censuring Aristophanes, although hisSummary of a Comparison between Aristophanes and Menanderunambiguously favored Menander and New Comedy over Attic Old Comedy. Plutarch blamed Aristophanes...

“You’re reading a piece of Aristophanes, and don’t get anything out of it. You pore over thescholia, looking and learning, wracking your brain. [Finally,] after fifteen minutes, getting the sense of it, you burst out laughing, saying: ‘That was funny!’” Thus Ioannes Psychares in 1914 captured Greek expectations, anxieties, and surprises of the closing era of the narrowly philological reception of Aristophanes.¹ Psychares was one of the leaders of the Demoticist movement of the 1880s, when the Greek language debate came to a head in a climate of literary and cultural renewal. Throughout the nineteenth century the linguistic controversy...

The damp basement of the Athens Theater Museum holds four curious albums of photographs, theater programs, press clippings, fragments of scripts, and heterogeneous personal memorabilia ranging from congratulatory notes and business cards to pieces of silk and even snips of wigs. Two of these albums belonged to Marios Rotzaïron and the other two carry the name of Georgios Christodoulou. This unassuming collection of unpublished source materials and theatrical paraphernalia provides a unique key to the most peculiar phase in the history of Aristophanes’ reception in Greece. Central to the stage careers of both Rotzaïron and Christodoulou were bawdyLysistrataadaptations,...

On the evening of 29 August 1959 more than three thousand theatergoers gathered at the Odeion of Herodes Atticus to attend an opening production of Aristophanes’Birds. Karolos Koun (1908–87), director of the Theatro Technes, or Art Theater, presented this bird utopia of 414 B.C.E. as part of the official and state-sponsored Athens Festival. Reportedly, from the very beginning of the play many spectators took offense at the liberties that the translator, Vasiles Rotas, had taken with the text. Rotas’ acting version employed bold anachronisms denouncing U.S. missiles, hand grenades, and military bases and airports, as well as icons...

Because of the diversity of Aristophanes productions at the end of Koun’s life and after, the materials in this chapter are quite varied. Particularly since 1975, many comic revivals have set forth nonmainstream alternatives to major interpretations, whether those were the rurallaïkotetaof Koun or the National Theater’s archaizing formalism followed by a mode of urban conformism. One unifying theme, however, has been the realization of the “marketplace” of Aristophanes, both through the expansion of literary and theater criticism and through the institutionalization or “framing” of the comic revival stage. Together, the influential core of Greek critics and the...

And I seek my way out of the dark, my first impulse is to try to capture the magnitude and grasp the impact of the Aristophanic performance that has left me overwhelmed. But I realize that there is no sense in reducing revival comedy to a single or completed narrative, because the Aristophanic experience is plural, transient, and above all open-ended. It would be contrary to the openness of the poet’s modern Greek future if I were to enforce historical closure as briskly as the curtain cut off the show. Where the finale calls for more, where no closing words...