Frogs. Assemblywomen. Wealth

Aristophanes has long been admired for his brilliant satire of the social, intellectual, and political life of Athens at its height. The new Loeb Classical Library edition of his plays - with a suitably romping translation facing a freshly edited Greek text - is brought to completion with this fourth volume. "Frogs" was produced in 405 b.c., shortly after the deaths of Sophocles and Euripides. Dionysus, on a journey to the underworld to retrieve Euripides, is recruited to judge a contest between the traditional Aeschylus and the modern Euripides, a contest that yields both comedy and insight on ancient literary taste. In "Assemblywomen" Athenian women plot to save Athens from male misgovernance. They institute a new social order in which all inequalities based on wealth, age, and beauty are eliminated-with raucously comical results. The gentle humour and straightforward morality of "Wealth" made it the most popular of Aristophanes' plays from classical times to the Renaissance. Here the god Wealth, cured of his blindness, is able to distinguish good people from bad.