Autor(en)

Neil, Robert Alexander (Hg.):

Verlag / Jahr

Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1966.

Format / Einband

Leinen / Cloth. 229 p.

Sprache

Englisch

Gewicht

ca. 550 g

Bestell-Nr

1200568

Bemerkungen

Minimal vergilbt, sonst sehr guter Zustand / Minimally yellowed, otherwise in very good condition. - INTRODUCTION. The comedy of the Knights was produced in Athens at the Lenaea in the year when Stratocles was eponymous archon. This date1 corresponds to the early part (probably February or March) of the year 424 B.c. Aristophanes for the first time appeared frankly as an author: the three plays he had already written had all been produced as by his friend Callistratus2. Aristophanes had two objects of attack throughout his plays produced in the period of the Old Comedy: these were the newer intellectual movements of the day and the politics, home and foreign, of the advanced democrats of Athens. The two were not really connected: Euripides and Socrates, with their coteries, seem to have held political opinions almost identical with Aristophanes’ own. If Aristophanes had shared the views they held on subjects other than politics, he might have shared their fate. As it was, he suffered nothing worse than a prosecution by Cleon : we do not know whether he was attacked in this way as a politician directly by a charge of disloyalty to the state, or indirectly by a charge of alien birth1. His first play, the AairaXfy B.c. 427, was directed against the first of the two movements above mentioned: the next three, Babylonians (426), Achamians (425), Knights, against the second. The chorus in each play was typical: the Babylonians are the subject-allies of Athens, treated by her as foreigners and slaves ; the Achamians are bigoted villagers, full of a narrow Attic patriotism and hate for Sparta; the Knights are the young flower of Athenian life, ready for enterprise and proud of their city, but tired of the political notions and leaders that prevailed. The Peloponnesian war was raised against Athens. Her imperialism deeply offended the Greek faith in the independence even of small states. Her allies pleaded that they had joined her in the belief that the confederacy, of which she was so much the absolute head, was against Persia and for no other purpose: they found themselves deluded and humiliated into tributaries2. Her democracy set an example to the commons of every state in Greece, inciting them to take power from the noble and the rich, to harass and overtax the classes, to irritate established authority by rhetoric and public discussion and litigation. She had too much commercial prosperity and wanted more: this had ruined Aegina and might ruin Corinth and other busy ports. Her amazing intellectual brilliancy had come after the fall of Miletus and the other Ionian cities which might have been as brilliant as Athens if they had remained free. Her active and successful democracy roused the slow jealousy of the great aristocracies— Thebes, Sparta, Corinth, each with its own reasons for enmity —into a readiness for war.

Unser Preis

EUR 28,00

(inkl. MwSt.)

Versandkostenfrei innerhalb Deutschlands

Aufgenommen mit whBOOK

Sicheres Bestellen - Order-Control geprüft!