Aristophanes, 1: The Acharnians, Peace, Celebrating Ladies, Wealth

The Penn Greek Drama Series presents original literary translations of the entire corpus of classical Greek drama: tragedies, comedies, and satyr plays. It is the only contemporary series of all the surviving work of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, and Menander.

Aristophanes wrote most of his comedic masterpieces during the Peloponnesian War, parodying the tumultuous politics and society of that time with trademark innuendoes and bawdy stagings and dialogue. In these plays, Aristophanes brings every rhetorical strategem into play to treat the reader to stories of one man’s attempt to create a ＂war-free zone,＂ the rescue of the imprisoned Peace on the back of a giant dung beetle, a satire of Euripides’s sympathies for women, and the hustling and healing of a blind and destitute Wealth in order to redistribute the world’s riches.

Translations are by Jack Flavin (Acharnians), Fred Beake (Peace), David Slavitt (Celebrating Ladies), and Palmer Bovie (Wealth). The volume includes an introduction by Ralph Rosen, Professor of Classics at the University of Pennsylvania.

About the Translators: Fred Beake was born in Cheshire in 1948, grew up in the rural West Riding, and has lived in Bath since 1972. He is the author of several books of original poetry and translations, including The Whiteness of Her Becoming, The Fisher Queen, and Places and Elegies. In addition to his work as a poet, he has written critical works on Shelley and H.D. and has published numerous articles and reviews in Acumen, the Green Book, and the New Statesman. His translations include works by Horace, Catullus, and Alcuin. Since 1990 he has served as the main poetry reviewer for Stand and is currently coeditor of the magazine Poet’s Voice. Palmer Bovie was educated at the Lawrenceville School and Princeton University. He received his Ph.D. degree in classics from Columbia University and taught at Columbia, Princeton, Indiana University, the American Academy in Rome, and Rutgers University, where he is Emeritus Professor of Classics. He has published many translations from classical literature, including Virgil’s Georgics, orations of Cicero, satires and epistles of Horace, epigrams of Martial, and the De rerum natura of Lucretius. With David R. Slavitt he coedited the Complete Roman Drama in Translation series. Jack Flavin writes and translates poetry for numerous academic journals, including Classical Outlook, Modern Age, Cimmaron Review, and Apalachia Quarterly. He has coedited Poulty: A Magazine of Voice, serving as principal editor for eleven years. A veteran of World War II, he went on to graduate from the University of Maryland, and later received his Master of Foreign Studies from the University of Zurich and his M.S. in Library Science from Drexel Tech. David R. Slavitt was educated at Andover and Yale and has published more than sixty books: original poetry (recently Epic and Epigram), translations (recently Broken Columns, of Statius and Claudian, University of Pennsylvania Press), novels (recently The Cliff), critical works (recently Virgil), and short stories. He worked for seven years as a journalist at Newsweek and continues to do freelance reporting and reviewing. With Palmer Bovie he coedited the Complete Roman Drama in Translation series.