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  • Published: 5 May 2003
  • ISBN: 9780140448146
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 304
  • RRP: $22.99

Lysistrata and Other Plays




Writing at a time when Athens was undergoing a crisis in its social attitudes, Aristophanes was an eloquent opponent of the demagogue and the sophist. This collection includes Lysistrata, the hilariously bawdy anti-war fantasy; The Acharnians, a plea for peace set against the background of the long war with Sparta; and The Clouds, a satire on contemporary philosophy.

  • Published: 5 May 2003
  • ISBN: 9780140448146
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 304
  • RRP: $22.99

Other books in the series

Maldoror and Poems
On Sparta
Love
Annals
Military Dispatches

About the authors

Aristophanes Aristophanes

Aristophanes was born, probably in Athens, c. 449 BC and died between 386 and 380 BC. Little is known about his life, but there is a portrait of him in Plato's Symposium. He was twice threatened with prosecution in the 420s for his outspoken attacks on the prominent politician Cleon, but in 405 he was publicly honored and crowned for promoting Athenian civic unity in The Frogs. Aristophanes had his first comedy produced when he was about twenty-one, and wrote forty plays in all. The eleven surviving plays of Aristophanes are published in the Penguin Classics series as The Birds and Other Plays, Lysistrata and Other Plays, and The Wasps / The Poet and the Women / The Frogs.