Mother Earth Festival Women (Frog)

Author: (Ancient Greece) Aristophanes, translated by Luo Niansheng
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-04-01
Features: Aristophanes (c. 446–385 BC), a representative poet of Old Comedy in Athens, wrote over forty plays, with eleven surviving. Throughout his life, he witnessed the glory under Pericles, the turmoil of the Peloponnesian War, and the decline of Athens. His plays are distinct in their orientation, filled with sharp satire and criticism of the times, vividly portraying his reflections on Athenian democracy and cultural trends from the mid-5th century BC to the early 4th century BC. In The Thesmophoriazusae, performed in 411 BC, the tragic poet Euripides becomes the target of Aristophanes' attack. The protagonists in the play—women participating in the Thesmophoria—decide to kill Euripides because he maliciously insults them in his tragedies. The Frogs, performed in 405 BC, marks the transition from Old Comedy to Middle Comedy. The play depicts Dionysus, the god of wine, traveling to the underworld due to his dissatisfaction with the status of Athenian tragedy. Aristophanes' comparison and evaluation of Euripides and Aeschylus pioneered the tradition of European literary criticism. The included works The Thesmophoriazusae and The Frogs are translations by the renowned classicist Luo Niansheng. The Thesmophoriazusae is excerpted from Two Comedies by Aristophanes (1981 edition) published by Hunan People's Publishing House, while The Frogs is taken from an excerpted version of Selected Ancient Greek and Roman Works (1988 edition) published by Beijing Publishing House, with the abridged sections supplemented by Luo Tong. Except for typographical errors, the comparative edition largely preserves the original form of the translations.