Aristophanes and politics : : new studies / / edited by Ralph M. Rosen, Helene P. Foley.

• Superior document: Columbia Studies in the Classical Tradition; 45
• TeilnehmendeR: Rosen, Ralph Mark,; Foley, Helene P., 1942-
• Place / Publishing House: Leiden, The Netherlands ;, Boston : : Brill,, [2020]; ©2020
• Year of Publication: 2020
• Language: English
• Series: Columbia Studies in the Classical Tradition; 45.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource.

The essays in this volume explore the many aspects of the “political” in the plays of Greek comic dramatist Aristophanes (5th century BCE), posing a variety of questions and approaching them through diverse methodological lenses. They demonstrate that “politics” as reflected in Aristophanes’ plays remains a fertile, and even urgent, area of inquiry, as political developments in our own time distinctly color the ways in which we articulate questions about classical Athens. As this volume shows, the earlier scholarship on politics in (or “and”) Aristophanes, which tended to focus on determining Aristophanes’ “actual” political views, has by now given way to approaches far more sensitive to how comic literary texts work and more attentive to the complexities of Athenian political structures and social dynamics. All the studies in this volume grapple to varying degrees with such methodological tensions, and show, that the richer and more diverse our political readings of Aristophanes can become, the less stable and consistent, as befits a comic work, they appear to be.

Table of Contents

Introduction / Helene P. Foley and Ralph M. Rosen -- Prolegomena : accessing and understanding Aristophanic politics / Ralph M. Rosen -- Politics and laughter : the case of Aristophanes' Knights / Robin Osborne -- Patterns of avoidance and indirection in Athenian political satire / Jeffrey Henderson -- Conservative and radical : Aristophanic comedy and populist debate in democratic Athens / I. A. Ruffell -- Aristophanes' political comedies and (bad?) imitations / Olimpia Imperio -- Politics in the street : some citizen encounters in Aristophanes / Stephen Halliwell -- The politics of diversity : a quantitative analysis of Aristophanes / Carina de Klerk -- Strong household, strong city : space and politics in Aristophanes' Acharnians / Nina Papathanasopoulou -- Aristophanes' Birds as satire on Athenian opportunists in Thrace / Edith Hall -- The politics of dissensus in Aristophanes' Birds / Mario Telò -- Inscribing Athenians : the alphabetic chorus in Aristophanes' Babylonians and the politics and Aesthetics of inscription and conscription in fifth-century Athens / Deborah Steiner -- Afterword : the Boy from Cydathenaeum : some concluding reflections / Paul Cartledge.