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Copyright of Logos: A Journal, of Religion, Philosophy Comparative Cultural Studies & Art (08687692) is the property of Logos and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Supposititious children may be defined as children smuggled into households and then presented as legitimate off-spring. This article considers the sources that refer to such children in the Classical and Hellenistic periods at Athens. It explores the underlying concern of the male citizen that these children might be enrolled in the citizen population. It explains that this anxiety was tied to the possible contamination of their imagined pure bloodlines, a contamination they believed threatened the legitimate operation of the social, cultural, and political mechanisms of the city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the phenomenon of ancient Greek theater, portraying it as a unique space where an entire cityscape unfolded before the eyes of thousands of spectators. Despite its mesmerizing effect, there's ongoing debate about its educational impact. In the first part of the article, sources are analyzed in which ancient authors argue for or against the notion that the theater, for which Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides composed, and which was occasionally attended by Socrates, could serve as a kind of school for adults and adolescents. Plato's dialogues, featuring Socrates as the central figure, dissect the differences between philosopher, playwright, and sophist wisdom, suggesting that the theater may not have been primarily aimed at enlightening the masses, but rather at showcasing persuasive rhetoric. Aristotle and Aristophanes stress the importance of playwrights acting as guides for citizens, albeit acknowledging that not all possess the wisdom to effectively mentor citizens in civic engagement and personal growth. In the second part, the article analyzes select tragedies by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, seen as valuable sources for instructing citizens. These playwrights' works are depicted as poignant reflections of the challenges faced by inhabitants of various cities, with heroes striving to offer guidance to themselves or others. Based on Aristotle's classification of tragic forms, it suggests that protagonists in these tragedies undergo transformative experiences, whether through reversal, discovery, calamity and spectacle. This also opened up wide opportunities for spectators to project what was happening on stage onto themselves and their city, taking guidance from the playwrights and becoming a special kind of disciples.

In this paper, I argue against the prevailing view that Aristophanes in the Clouds characterizes Socrates as a "sophistic" teacher-for-pay. To do so, I reexamine the play's five potential references to teaching payments—Strepsiades' description of the Thinkery (98–99), his offer of a wage (245–249), the Clouds' exhortation to Socrates (804–812), a joke about Hyperbolus (874–876), and the "honor" that Socrates receives from Strepsiades (1146–1147)—within the framework of Aristophanes' comic technique. I demonstrate that Aristophanes, particularly in the sections of the play most significant for the characterization of Socrates (126–509 and 627–803), portrays Socrates not as a venal teacher looking to take advantage of his students but as an impractical intellectual who has no concern for money. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From a theoretical perspective interested in the functionality of material culture and its implications for the understanding of Greek comedy, this article will analyze, in Peace (421 B.C.E.), the episode of War’s entrance and the description of his culinary preparations towards the end of the play's prologue (vv. 236-300). War (Polemos), represented here as a Panhellenic tyrant capable of exerting force over the objects around him, replaces in its personification the divine agency and is opposed in these verses to the passive description of the cities as mere ingredients of a sauce recipe he intends to eat. Ironically, the play will show that reification ends up functioning as a triggering instance of political subjectivity at the international level.

The article deals with a joke in vv. 34–36 of Aristophanes’ “Acharnians.” Dicaeopolis describes the anguish he feels because of the war and the unwillingness of his fellow citizens to make peace. He longs for his village and his deme and dreams of peace; the city disgusts him. Recalling his former happiness in the village, Dicaeopolis says that his deme unlike the city οὐδεπώποτ’ εἶπεν “ἄνθρακας πρίω”, / οὐκ “ὄξος”, οὐκ “ἔλαιον”, οὐδ’ ᾔδει “πρίω”, / ἀλλ’ αὐτὸς ἔφερε πάντα χὠ πρίων ἀπῆν (34–36). The following interpretation of the joke is argued for. Firstly, the joke is based on the wordplay πρίω / ὁ πρίων. Secondly, πρίω “buy” should be understood not as the shouting of the sellers, but as demands coming from those close to Dicaeopolis or from Dicaeopolis himself. Finally, in the form ὁ πρίων one should see not a proper name or a designation of a saw, but a substantivized participle “gnashing (one’s teeth),” used figuratively to mean “irritated,” “angry.” This participle does not refer to the sellers, but to Dicaeopolis himself and other peasants who are forced to buy goods in the city.

In this article, jumping off from Geoffrey de Ste. Croix's treatment of Aristophanes and the Megarian Decree, I argue that Old Comedy is an underutilised category of evidence for the study of the popular intellectual history of Athens. My particular focus here is the Athenian empire: how does Old Comedy present Athenian power and what does this comic presentation tell us about how at least some ordinary Athenians understood it? Can one popular Athenian imaginary of the empire be constructed through analysis of Aristophanes and his contemporaries? I will argue that Old Comedy, taken as a corpus, presents a very Athenian empire, that is to say one focused on Athens and its exploitation of others. The comic poets, therefore, likely assumed parochialism and myopia on the part of their audience, but also significant topical interest in the mechanisms of Athenian power, particularly those which brought revenue to Athens. This impression of highly topical engagement with the empire is corroborated by bringing Comedy into dialogue with other sources, in particular the epigraphic record. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building on an insight by Kenneth Dover, this paper proposes a comparative reading of the finale of Aeschylus’ Eumenides and that of Aristophanes’ Frogs: in both texts, a torch-lit procession accompanies a character (the Semnai in the tragedy, Aeschylus in the comedy) who must ensure the well-being of the city. In this performative, structural, dramaturgical and thematic similarity, we find Aristophanes’ intention to revive not only Aeschylus as a character, but also Aeschylus as a playwright, espousing a qualifying point of his ideology, the call for the city harmony. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article bridges a gap in the study of Aristophanic humour by better demonstrating how individual jokes (in this case, the para prosdokian 'contrary to expectation' joke) contribute to the wider comic scenes in which they are embedded. After analysing ancient and modern explanations and examples of para prosdokian jokes, this paper introduces the concept of 'comic bit', a discrete unit of comedy that builds humour around a central premise, and establishes how para prosdokian jokes contribute to comic bits in a way that recent theories of para prosdokian cannot account for. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we offer a detailed analysis of the particle που in Attic drama. We argue that Attic που is a marker of indirect personal evidentiality; it marks, in other words, that the information expressed has been obtained by inference or presumption. Additionally, we hypothesize that που is a pragmatic, intersubjective particle serving to establish or maintain common ground between speaker and addressee. In particular, as a grounding and hedging device, it can convey information with caution, putting speaker and addressee on the same informational level in order not to offend the addressee. In Section 1 we offer a concise statement of our argument and discuss a number of linguistic phenomena relevant to our analysis, most notably evidentiality, common ground, hedging, and grammaticalization (Sections 1.1–1.4). Section 2 outlines our corpus-based methodology and analytical criteria. The body of our paper is devoted to a close linguistic analysis of our corpus (Section 3). Section 4 offers our main conclusions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article deals with the history of interpretation of the joke in v. 21–23 of Aristophanes’ Assemblywomen. There is no consensus among researchers about the meaning of the passage under consideration, what order of verses is preferable, and what role these verses play in the opening scene of the comedy. The textual and contextual analysis allows the author to interpret the obscure passage so that the proposed interpretation suits the poetics of Aristophanes’ comedies best. The author of the article argues against the change in the manuscripts’ order of the verses. The passage in question should be understood as follows: Aristophanes quotes a certain Phyromachus, who in public space made a speech mistake and instead of ἑτέρας ἕδρας ʽother places’ said ἑταίρας ἕδρας, which approximately means ‘hetairas’ seats.’ Since the context implies that the female characters ought to ʽtake their places,’ the quotation of Phyromachus’ mistake turns out to be suitable. In addition, the reduction of the paratragic pathos of the opening scene of the comedy with the help of a joke based on physiological humor is characteristic for the poetic toolkit of Aristophanes and allows him to gain the favor of viewers of different cultural levels.

This article examines scatology in Aristophanes Assemblywomen , and argues that the play sets out to subvert comedy's normal scatological poetics. Old Comedy is usually a genre characterized by corporeal and scatological freedom. The constipation scene in Assemblywomen 311–73 is therefore highly unusual, since, while its language is scatological almost to the point of excess, it spotlights not scatological freedom but scatological obstruction. This article argues that this inversion is expressly linked to the play's reversal of gender roles as part of its 'women on top' plot, which is in turn conceived as a direct challenge to Old Comedy's normative poetics. The article further suggests that recognizing the Assemblywomen 's less than straightforward relationship to the norms of Old Comedy may help us to reassess how, and indeed whether, we should use Aristophanes' plays to make conjectures about the genre as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Antilogies, or pairs of symmetrically opposed speeches or arguments, were generally ignored by Plato, Isocrates, Aristotle, Cicero, and Diogenes Laertius, and, later, by Eduard Norden, Hermann Diels, and most modern scholars of antiquity. As a consequence, until the end of the twentieth century CE, antilogies have been ignored or, at best, treated as a minor literary device to be mentioned only with reference to individual writings. Nevertheless, during the second half of the fifth century, antilogies were a crucially important form of argument and persuasion in 'sophistic' thought, philosophy, historiography, comedy and tragedy, and other fields. In order to redress the historical neglect of the art of antilogy, this essay provides an inventory (doubtless incomplete) of some 30 antilogies composed by playwrights such as Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes, historians such as Herodotus and Thucydides, and, most importantly, 'sophists' such as Protagoras, Gorgias, Prodicus and Antiphon (in addition to a few other writers of the same period). Building on this inventory, the second part of the essay seeks to establish identifying features of antilogy and assess its cultural significance in the Athenian context (in the second half of the fifth century BCE). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the time of Euripides and Aristophanes, innovative pedagogical ideas were discussed in an equally innovative man-ner. The intellectuals of that era played a significant role in cre-ating an ironic pedagogical triangle consisting of Euripides, Aris-tophanes, Socrates, and the sophists in classical Athens. Employ-ing tragedy and comedy in varying degrees, Euripides and Aris-tophanes drew attention to the contrast between traditional and sophistic education, portraying it as a complex problem that could not be easily resolved by an average person. A comparative historical and pedagogical analysis of Euripides' tragedy “Me-dea” and Aristophanes' comedy “Clouds” revealed another direc-tion for studying the possibilities of mutual penetration of gen-res. Through the depiction of families with children who were divided into speakers and listeners in the spatial coordinates of the city and home, Euripides and Aristophanes participated in the ongoing debate regarding Socrates and the sophists. Euripides and Aristophanes include in their works agons between the advo-cates of just (non-sophistic) and unjust (sophistic) speeches, which touch upon educational issues. The main characters lose in these agons and realize that their problems cannot be solved even when they use sophistic techniques. This comprehension compels them to transition from words to actions, resorting to criminal acts to demonstrate the perilous consequences of sophistic educa-tion to the polis. A simultaneous historical and pedagogical anal-ysis of Euripides' tragedy “Medea” and Aristophanes' comedy “Clouds” is accompanied by references to other works of Euripi-des and Aristophanes, as well as by Plato and Xenophon, which contain explicit or implicit references to the teaching methods of Socrates and / or the sophists.

Among several Indo-European poetic and literary inheritances from which Aristophanes draws in his play The Frogs, a crucial one seems to have been overlooked thus far, which ties together seemingly disparate beats and motifs in the play.  This is the metaphor analogizing poets to carpenters, their craft (poems) to ships, and recitation/composition as sailing, which besides its appearance in other branches of the Indo-European languages, is attested in other places in the Greek corpus too, especially in the works of Pindar.  Tying this inherited poetic trope in with the metaphorical “ship of state” (attested in the lyric poets, tragedians, Plato, etc.) and the on-the-ground importance of Athens’s naval culture and service to its polity makes the trope into more than just a technique for poetic embellishment, but rather, a crucial element in interpreting the literary and political significance of these aforementioned seemingly disparate sections of the play, the motivations of characters, and the play’s overall message, in what is one of Arisophanes’s plays which most pointedly comments on the process and importance of producing poetry.  By analogizing shipbuilding and sailing to poesy and by unifying the act of rowing in ships to citizenship, Aristophanes intertwines the proper construction and appreciation of poetry with the health of the Athenian polity and participation in it.

Copyright of Bursa Uludağ Journal of Economy & Society / Bursa Uludağ Üniversitesi İktisadi ve İdari Bilimler Fakültesi Dergisi is the property of Uludag Universitesi Iktisadi ve Idari Bilimler Fakultesi Dergisi and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Aristophanes’ comedy “Assemblywomen” begins with an apostrophe. In paratragic style, the character addresses the lamp as if she were a solar deity. The second verse of the comedy should contain a characterization that praises the lamp. However, there is a textological problem in the manuscripts that does not allow us to understand the idea of this verse. Editors and commentators of the comedy proposes several conjectures and interpretations, but none of the proposed corrections gives a clear meaning and does not seem appropriate in praising the lamp as a solar deity. The article offers textological arguments and analysis of the beginning of the comedy and the author claims that the best reading is κάλλιστ’ ἐν εὐσκόποισιν ἐξηυρημένον —“…beautifully devised so as to be among the well-seeing [luminaries].”

The article is devoted to the interpretation of the passage from Aristophanes’ “Acharnians” (94–97), in which Dikeopolis expresses his feelings caused by the appearance of the Persian ambassador Pseudartabas in a strange Persian costume. According to the traditional point of view, which had its origins in the ancient scholia, the appearance and gait of Pseudartabas resembled a ship, and it is in comparison with the ship that the meaning of the joke lies. The article offers a different explanation: Dikeopolis mocks some elements of the traditional Persian costume, showing their similarity to a damage on a warship and thereby emphasizing the contradiction between the appearance of Pseudartabas and the usual claims of the Persians to sea power.

In the prologue of Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazusae (134–140) Euripides’ Inlaw after seeing the poet Agathon expresses his bewilderment at the mixture of gender signals emitted by Agathon’s clothes and the objects he is surrounded with. Inlaw enumerates several couples of objects incompatible because of their relatedness to one or another gender: barbitos and saffron gown, lyre and headband, lekythos (an attribute of athletics) and breast band, sword and mirror. In this paper I reconsider commentators’ opinions on the question whether there was indeed a sword among the props visible to the public or the sword was mentioned by Inlaw because it was present in the passage from Aeschylus’ Edonians explicitly parodied in the questions asked by Inlaw. A. Sommestein’s speculation that Agathon needs a sword to get into a male role is rejected as contradicting Agathon’s words in v. 154–155. I also call in question G. Kaibel’s surmise (supported by C. Prato, C. Austin and D. Olson) that the sword was present in the parodied scene of the Edonians because Dionysus was represented in armis there, as a conqueror of new lands. I consider that there are no firm reasons to think that there was a sword among the props of the comedy or that it was mentioned in the parodied tragedy as a thing present in the scene in which Lycurgus interrogated Dionysus. It is more probable that sword (as well as lekythos) is mentioned by Inlaw just as a most typical male thing opposed to typically female mirror. I also suppose that v. 140 “What can a sword and a mirror have in common?” is rather a recast of the anonymous comic aphorism “What can a blind man and a mirror have in common?” (apud Stob. 4.30.6a) than vice versa (whoever the author of this aphorism might be).

The paper presents the Asseblywomen Project, conducted by Papalangki Theatre Company during 2020–2021 at the Women's Prison in Eleonas (Greece). Using as rehearsal material the comedy play "The Assemblywomen" by Aristophanes, the project aimed to encourage the participation of ex-drug addicted inmate women at the rehabilitation process, and to help their empowerment both on individual and collective level. By improvising the play's scenes, the women became more aware politically and managed to express their own thoughts and feelings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aristophanes' Frogs was first performed at the Lenaea festival of 405 in competition with Plato's Cleophon and Phrynichus' Muses. This paper argues that Frogs contains a series of agonistic jokes against Phrynichus, most of which have gone unnoticed because he shares his name with a tragic poet and a politician; Aristophanes plays with the ambiguity of the name Phrynichus to mock his Lenaean rival by comparing him unfavourably with his namesakes. Aristophanes ultimately claims that his comedy is superior to that of Phrynichus because he is more successful than his rival in appropriating and redeploying other comedians' material. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article prints five new letters from Thomas Mitchell (1783–1845), classical scholar and translator of Aristophanes, to reforming journalist Leigh Hunt. Written between 1810 and 1816, these letters illuminate a creatively significant period for both authors, whose intimacy dates to their student days at Christ's Hospital. While Mitchell's early friendship with Hunt has long been recognised by Hunt scholars, his wider place within Hunt's circle of friends and the extent of his literary collaboration with the editor of The Examiner are still largely unknown. As such, this newly published selection of Mitchell's correspondence allows us to revisit his relationship with Hunt in a fresh light, in the years beyond Christ's Hospital, while providing an opportunity to recover details about the development of Mitchell's career as a Romantic author and translator. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a re-reading of Aristophanes's comedy Ekklesiazusai (Assembly Women). It shows that this play exhibits the aporias of the binary gender order, which had evolved in classical fifth-century Athens, along with other dualisms typical of the period, such as the opposition of pólis and oíkos. The paper argues that Aristophanes negotiates these dualisms against the background of changing epistemological conditions of the fifth century, i. e. the establishment of the "principle of bivalence". From the perspective of theater and literary history, this development made the chorus increasingly unrecognizable, since it was primarily a figure of non-binary (and also cosmological) relations. The chorus becomes newly legible today precisely where dualisms erode. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the tragic chorus has drawn much attention and analysis, the comedic chorus has gone largely overlooked in the fields of classical philology, literary studies, philosophy, and theater studies. But the chorus of Greek comedy is distinct from that of tragedy. It is a kind of swarm. It is living on in the comical personage of later comedies, though these presumably have no chorus. The choruses oppose the unity of dramatic form, as is shown in particular by the parabasis. They introduce displacements that repeatedly disturb the representations demanded by the tragic form and usher in the performative events that take place between the chorus and the spectators (and listeners). As this article shows, choric elements are therefore hardly an outdated episode of theatrical presentation. Comical personages like Buffo and Pulcinella are not closed, individuated characters but theatrical figures that belong in a series. They come from a chorus without preexisting distinctions and boundaries—a chorus of those who do not belong, of indefinite heterogeneities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Plato’s Republic V, 449a-457b, Socrates argues that the guardian class of Kallipolis will comprise both men and women and that women with the appropriate nature ought to receive the same education and fulfill the same tasks as their male counterparts. In this article I argue, against competing interpretations of this claim as dependent either on the necessity of abolishing the oikos or on eugenic principles, that Socrates’ argument ought to be understood as a genuine argument about women’s natural capabilities and ought to be interpreted in light of the Socratic debate about women’s virtues. Moreover, I show that the legal language mobilized, combined with polemical references to Aristophanes, serves the purpose of evoking Socrates’ trial, thus alerting the reader to the seriousness of the proposal in question.

Copyright of Cuadernos de Filología Clásica: Estudios Griegos e Indoeuropeos is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Cuadernos de Filología Clásica: Estudios Griegos e Indoeuropeos is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper offers a new interpretation of Ar. Nub. 554. The aim is to stress the dependence of the expression ἐκστρέψας ... κακὸς κακῶς on a principle of ancient literary criticism here called the "poetic identity principle", based on the overlap between the author's nature and the content of his work. This dependence has been neglected until now. Therefore, I shall prove the principle is present in the line by first analysing the structure of the sequence in which the line is found (518-559) and then comparing l. 554 to other of Aristophanes' loci. Moreover, I shall argue that Aristophanes usually recalls the principle to build negative and positive poetic paradigms: such a principle may also concern the author himself within his own work, which had not been noticed before. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Euroasian Journal of English Language & Literature is the property of Euroasian Journal of English Language & Literature and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Journal of Theatre Criticism & Dramaturgy / Tiyatro Eleştirmenliği ve Dramaturji Bölümü Dergisi is the property of Journal of Theatre Criticism & Dramaturgy and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Myrtia is the property of Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Murcia and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Cuadernos de Filología Clásica: Estudios Griegos e Indoeuropeos is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article examines the seventeen Greek literary and documentary papyri, in which Aristophanes is quoted or mentioned, and asks how these fragments contribute to our understanding of the early reception of the comedic poet, especially in the Roman and Late Antique periods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that Lampito, the Spartan character who takes part in the pacifist plot of Aristophanes' Lysistrata (411 BC), has been inspired by both parents of Agis II, the king of Sparta who led the war against Athens at the time of the Peloponnesian War and fortified Deceleia in 413 BC. Agis' mother bore the quite rare name of Lampito as well; his father, the 'pacifist' King Archidamos II, voted against the war at the Spartan Assembly in 432. Aristophanes knew of Archidamos' speech from oral tradition, possibly from the report of the Athenian ambassadors at Sparta or, alternatively and more probably, from public readings of Thucydides' account of the pre-war debate that took place in the Spartan Assembly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ZUSAMMENFASSUNG In der bisherigen Hegel-Literatur wird Schlegel zumeist als Hegels Antipode behandelt. Im Gegensatz dazu richtet sich mein Interesse in der vorliegenden Arbeit darauf, zu zeigen, dass Hegels Darstellung der Komödie In der „Phänomenologie des Geistes“ unter dem Einfluss von Schlegels Texten über die Komödie entstanden sein könnte. Um dies belegen zu können, werden zunächst die literaturgeschichtliche Bedeutung von Schlegels Aufsatz über Aristophanes aus dem Jahr 1974 und der Ruf gezeigt, den er in der damaligen intellektuellen Öffentlichkeit erlangte. Daraufhin soll dargelegt werden, inwieweit es strukturelle Überschneidungen zwischen Hegels und Schlegels Darstellungen der Komödie gibt. Im Zentrum der Argumentation steht aber, dass beide Autoren die Parabase als das zentrale Element der Darstellung verwenden. Im letzten Teil der Arbeit wird aber versucht zu zeigen, dass Hegel über Schlegel hinausgeht, sofern die Komödie in Hegels System das Potenzial darstellt, über die Art und Weise der Vorstellung hinaus zum absoluten Wissen zu gelangen.

First sixteen verses of Aristophanes’ Acharnians pose many questions to their commentator. Scholars had various conjectures concerning events that had provoked strong emotions of Dicaeopolis, about his ways of describing the emotions as well as about the comic effects of the passage. The article deals with the most controversial of these questions. It is argued that the prologue reproduces tragic structure and parodies tragic language. E.g., in v. 1, a particular syntactic construction is used that transforms Dicaeopolis’ tragic exclamation into a comic one. The events mentioned by Dicaeopolis belong to the sphere of the theatre. E. g., the first story is about Cleon vomiting out five talents (vv. 5–8) is explained as an allusion to the comedy produced not long before the Acharnians. Combining linguistic and historical analysis in other cases as well makes it possible to throw some light on the facts alluded to in the play as well as on Dicaeopolis’s reactions to them.

This paper sketches a taxonomy of Aristophanic puns and explores the strategies employed by 'faithful' English translations for rendering such jokes. No pun is untranslatable. At the same time, there is no perfect translation but a range of options, more or less effective for a certain context, audience, and type of pun. The challenges which translators face with Aristophanic jokes, as well as the ingenious solutions they offer on occasions, invite us to reappraise the original puns, whose wittiness is too often denied by scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]