CONTENTS
Preface
References and Abbreviations
INTRODUCTION
Select Bibliography
Aristophanes
Frogs
Note on the Text
Sigla
PARALLEL GREEK TEXT AND ENGLISH TRANSLATION
COMMENTARY
Aristophanes' Frogs was produced in 405 BC, shortly
after the deaths of the two great veteran Athenian tragic dramatists
Euripides and Sophocles; it was restaged a year later, a few weeks
before a starving Athens at last accepted defeat in the long Peloponnesian
War. Dionysus, the god of drama, wine and joyful celebration,
goes down to the underworld to bring his favourite poet, Euripides,
back from the dead, and surprises both himself and the audience
by bringing back instead Aeschylus, who had died fifty years before,
with the mission of saving both Athens and Tragedy from ruin.
The contest for the throne of tragedy between Euripides and Aeschylus
is the earliest sustained piece of literary criticism in the Western
tradition. This edition is the first to combine a reliable English
translation of Frogs with a full explanatory commentary;
it also includes a freshly constituted Greek text.
Alan H. Sommerstein is Professor of Greek and Director of the Centre for Ancient Drama and its Reception, University of Nottingham, editor of the Arisophanes volumes in the Aris & Phillips Classical Texts series (198096) and of Aeschylus Eumenides (Cambridge, 1989); author of Aeschylean Tragedy (Bari, 1996); co-editor of Tragedy, Comedy and the Polis (Bari, 1993) and several other multi-author volumes.
320pp. (1997) cl 647 6 £35 / $59.99, pb 648 4 £17.50 / $32
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Preface INTRODUCTION PARALLEL GREEK TEXT AND ENGLISH TRANSLATION COMMENTARY |
SOME COMMENTS BY REVIEWERS
"this translation and commentary is a work of thorough and
judicious scholarship, enlivened by many personal touches and
an evident delight in Aristophanes' imaginative brilliance."
Bryn Mawr Classical Review
"Libraries that own the Loeb parallel
text series should purchase the entire set of Aristophanic comedies."
Choice
RELATED BOOKS
See under ARISTOPHANES in this series. The final volume WEALTH
will include the INDEXES to all the volumes of Aristophanes' plays
and is expected sometime in the year 2001.