Cover of The Acharnians by Aristophanes Ebook The Acharnians
Ebook · Sovereign

The Acharnians

Author
Aristophanes
Series
Greek Comedy
Language
English
Length
62 pages
ISBN
9781911535850
Published
10 November 2016
Imprint
Sovereign
  • Aristophanes
  • Greek
  • Athens
  • comic
  • comedy
  • humour
  • humorous
  • play
  • Greece
  • mythology

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Description

In Aristophanes' The Acharnians, among his earliest surviving comedies, the farmer Dicaeopolis makes a private peace with Sparta while Athens is still at war. On the page you follow the Acharnian charcoal-burners as they try to punish him, then the comic market that opens once he is no longer bound by the city's siege — wine, eels, Lamachus the general as walking militarism. Old Comedy as farce with a civic sting: peace as ordinary good sense against patriotic heat, the cost of war counted in a private larder.

Author

Aristophanes was a comic playwright of ancient Athens. Eleven of his forty plays survive virtually complete. These, together with fragments of some of his other plays, provide the only real examples of a genre of comic drama known as Old Comedy, and are used to define it. Also known as the Father of Comedy and the Prince of Ancient Comedy, Aristophanes has been said to recreate the life of ancient Athens more convincingly than any other author.

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