Oh My, the ancient Greeks knew how to have fun.

Amusing, risqué, clever, insightful and, if you have a good translation —or if you can read Greek—, poetic, ( )

4/17/22

TBB-3

Sometimes things do not translate well from one time to another (or one language to another, either). Some of the plays, such as the Birds, the Frogs, and Lysistrata, are interesting and fun plays. Many of the rest simply are too tied to the political players of the time to be compelling. It is difficult to find much relevant to today in plays extolling monarchy at the expense of democracy, so those plays are only interesting as a curiosity, since the story lines are only okay. There was some interest in the idea of a man ascending to heaven on a dung beetle to seek peace, but the story felt flat and underdeveloped. I realize it is not fair to a work out of its time to judge it by the standards of our own time, but I am not a classical scholar, and am not able to judge it by the standards of its own time (to be fair to me, I don't think many classical scholars are really able to do that either; they are just able to understand where it fit, and the political references, in a more detailed manner). Overall, it was a disappointment. ( )

Undici commedie con testo greco a fronte.