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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 faculty
of comprehension in the people who appreciate it, than
could anywhere be found at an earlier epoch.
Speaking broadly and generally, the Aristophanic drama
has more in common with modern ways of looking at
things, more in common with the conditions of the modern
stage, especially in certain directions—burlesque,
extravaganza, musical farce, and even ‘pantomime,’
than with the earlier and graver products of the Greek
mind.
The eleven plays, all that have come down to us out
of a total of over forty staged by our author in the
course of his long career, deal with the events of
the day, the incidents and personages of contemporary
Athenian city life, playing freely over the surface
of things familiar to the audience and naturally provoking
their interest and rousing their prejudices, dealing
with contemporary local gossip, contemporary art and
literature, and above all contemporary politics, domestic
and foreign. All this farrago of miscellaneous
subjects is treated in a frank, uncompromising spirit
of criticism and satire, a spirit of broad fun, side-splitting
laughter and reckless high spirits. Whatever lends
itself to ridicule is instantly seized upon; odd,
eccentric and degraded personalities are caricatured,
social foibles and vices pilloried, pomposity and
sententiousness in the verses of the poets, particularly
the tragedians, and most particularly in Euripides—the
pet aversion and constant butt of Aristophanes’
satire—are parodied. All is fish that
comes to the Comic dramatists net, anything that will
raise a laugh is fair game.
“It is difficult to compare the Aristophanic
Comedy to any one form of modern literature, dramatic
or other. It perhaps most resembles what we now
call burlesque; but it had also very much in it of
broad farce and comic opera, and something also (in
the hits at the fashions and follies of the day with
which it abounded) of the modern pantomime. But
it was something more, and more important to the Athenian
public than any or all of these could have been.
Almost always more or less political, and sometimes
intensely personal, and always with some purpose more
or less important underlying its wildest vagaries
and coarsest buffooneries, it supplied the place of
the political journal, the literary review, the popular
caricature and the party pamphlet, of our own times.
It combined the attractions and influence of all these;
for its grotesque masks and elaborate ‘spectacle’
addressed the eye as strongly as the author’s
keenest witticisms did the ear of his audience."[1]
