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Aristophanes   /ˌærəstˈɔfəniz/   Listen
Aristophanes

noun
1.
An ancient Greek dramatist remembered for his comedies (448-380 BC).






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Aristophanes" Quotes from Famous Books



... an Athenian general of exceptionally tall stature; Aristophanes incessantly rallies him for his cowardice; he had cast away ...
— The Acharnians • Aristophanes

... hair, but his beard was still perfect in its flowing majesty; there was still an air of spring-time in his quiet smile, and wisdom on his ample brow. He was a fine old man according to the statement of those who had the happiness to gaze upon his face, to which Socrates and Aristophanes, formerly enemies, but then become friends, contributed their features. Hearing his last hours tinkling in his ears he determined to go and pay his respects to the king of France, because he was having just ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 2 • Honore de Balzac

... read, of course, Moliere, Racine, Corneille, besides many other lesser French writers. Of foreign authors, I am intimate with the works of Gozzi, Goldoni, Guarini, Bibbiena, Machiavelli, Secchi, Tasso, Ariosto, and Fedini. Whilst of those of antiquity I know most of the work of Euripides, Aristophanes, ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini

... palaces. His glory was well known to the Greeks. He was no doubt one of the "two kings called Sardanapalus," celebrated by Hellanicus; he must have been "the warlike Sardanapalus" of Cailisthenes; Herodotus spoke of his great wealth; and Aristophanes used his name as a by-word for magnificence. In his reign the Assyrian dominions reached their greatest extent, Assyrian art culminated, and the empire seemed likely to extend itself over the whole ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 2. (of 7): Assyria • George Rawlinson

... more intrepid when he resisted the caprices of the multitude who demanded of him, when he was a senator, to commit the injustice of summoning ten generals before the tribunals. He also infringed the iniquitous orders of the thirty tyrants of Athens. The satires of Aristophanes neither moved nor irritated him. The same dauntless firmness he displayed when brought before his judges, charged with impiety. 'If it is your wish to absolve me on condition that I henceforth be silent, I reply I love and honor you, but I ought rather to obey the gods than you. Neither ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker

... grotesque forms—beings who were ever present to the fancy of the Greeks, as a convenient step by which they could approach more nearly to the presence of the Divinity." But even out of that seemingly bare chaos, Athenian genius was learning how to construct, under Eupolis, Cratinus, and Aristophanes, that elder school of comedy, which remains not only unsurpassed, but unapproachable, save by Rabelais alone, as the ideal cloudland of masquerading wisdom, in which the whole universe goes mad—but with a subtle method ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley

... rests on his "Dialogues," intended to ridicule the heathen philosophy and religion, and which show him to have been one of the great masters of ancient satire and mockery. His style of dialogue—a combination of Plato and Aristophanes—is not much used by modern writers, and his peculiar kind of ridicule is reserved now for the stage. Yet he cannot be called a writer of comedy, like Moliere. He resembles Rabelais and Swift more than any other modern writers, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord

... the market-place. Indeed, the poetic temperament is only too apt, out of the very warmth of its sensitive humanity, to idealize the old traditions and throw a glamour around them. That is why, both in politics and religion, there have been, ever since Aristophanes, so many great reactionary poets. Their warmth of human sympathy, their "nihil alienum" attitude; nay! their very sense of humour, have made this inevitable. There is so often, too, something chilly ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys

... told of Micylus, or Myscelus, as most of the ancient writers call him, another one was superadded. Suidas, on the authority of the Scholiast of Aristophanes, says that Myscelus, having consulted the oracle, concerning the colony which he was about to lead into a foreign country, was told that he must settle at the place where he should meet with rain in a clear sky, ex aithrias. ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso

... sentence may be interpreted by the notice of Suidas, who informs us that Apollonius was a contemporary of Eratosthenes, Euphorion and Timarchus, in the time of Ptolemy Euergetes, and that he succeeded Eratosthenes in the headship of the Alexandrian Library. Suidas also informs us elsewhere that Aristophanes at the age of sixty-two succeeded Apollonius in this office. Many modern scholars deny the "bibliothecariate" of Apollonius for chronological reasons, and there is considerable difficulty about it. The date of Callimachus' Hymn to Apollo, which closes with some lines ...
— The Argonautica • Apollonius Rhodius

... therefore each a complete, development; it is only a pitiful narrow-mindedness that will object to the Athenian that he did not know how to mould his state like the Fabii and the Valerii, or to the Roman that he did not learn to carve like Pheidias and to write like Aristophanes. It was in fact the most peculiar and the best feature in the character of the Greek people, that rendered it impossible for them to advance from national to political unity without at the same time exchanging their polity ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen

... in the art of swimming. I've got a capital chorus of mermaids to balance the other chorus of Biological Professors on the Challenger Expedition. I consider it's a happy cross between Ariosto and Aristophanes. If you like, I'll give you the score, and read over the words to you.' 'Do,' said the old man, settling himself down in comfort in his son's easy-chair, and assuming the sternest air of an impartial critic. Arthur Berkeley read on dramatically, in his own clever airy fashion, ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen

... pronounced its verdict. These works, in whatever shape we may be able to possess them, are the necessary foundations of even the smallest collections. Homer, Dante and Milton Shakespeare and Sophocles, Aristophanes and Moliere, Thucydides, Tacitus, and Gibbon, Swift and Scott,—these every lover of letters will desire to possess in the original languages or in translations. The list of such classics is short indeed, and when we ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang

... tales like these Stol'n from Aristophanes![36] Does it, if we miss your mind, Prove us so remote in kind? Birds! we but repeat on you What amongst ourselves we do. Somewhat more or somewhat less, 'Tis the same unskilfulness. What you feel, escapes our ken— Know we more our fellow ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold

... rather, by one whose own individuality dominates them to the exclusion of that nearness of the original author, which it should be the primary aim of the translator to evoke), the beautiful "Balaustion's Adventure," "Aristophanes' Apology," and "The Agamemnon of Aeschylus," and the third group, which comprises "Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau," "Red Cotton Nightcap Country," and "Fifine at the Fair"—these three groups are ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp

... eyes—unsealed the eyes of Englishmen in particular—to discover a literature, and the finest in the world, which habitually philosophised life: a literature which, whether in a chorus of Sophocles or a talk reported by Plato, or in a ribald page of Aristophanes or in a knotty chapter of Thucydides, was in one guise or another for ever asking Why? 'What is man doing here, and why is he doing it?' 'What is his purpose? his destiny?' 'How stands he towards those unseen powers—call them the gods, or whatever you will—that guide and thwart, provoke, ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch

... sincere deprecation, since Caesar had refused the thrice-offered crown on the Lupercal; and the effect was that intended throughout—the supreme honor of AEschylus in the guise of a tribute to Sophocles. The note of the whole affair was struck by the comic poet Aristophanes, whom the chairman called upon to make the closing speech of the evening, and who merely sat up long enough to quote the old Attic proverb, "Gentlemen, there are many ways to kill a dog besides choking him to death with butter," and then lay down again amid shrieks of merriment ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells

... Gemoll, we find him maintaining that the two parts were in ancient times regarded as one hymn in the age of Aristophanes. {18} If so, we can only reply, if we agree with Baumeister, that in the age of Aristophanes, or earlier, there was a plentiful lack of critical discrimination. As to Baumeister's theory that the ...
— The Homeric Hymns - A New Prose Translation; and Essays, Literary and Mythological • Andrew Lang

... the words not of Plato, who is supposed often enough to allow his imagination to carry him beyond his facts about the Sophists as about others, nor are they the words of a satiric poet such as {98} Aristophanes. They are the words of the most sober and philosophic of Greek historians, and they illustrate very strikingly the tendency, nay, the absolute necessity, whereby the theories of philosophers in the closet extend themselves into ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall

... Machiavel, and Aretino did (to let Bembo and Ariosto pass) with the great admiration and wonderment of the whole country: being indeed reputed matchable in all points, both for conceit of wit and eloquent deciphering of matters, either with Aristophanes and Menander in Greek, or with Plautus and Terence in Latin, or with any other in any other tongue. But I will not stand greatly with you in your own matters. If so be the Faery Queene be fairer in your eye than the Nine Muses, and Hobgoblin run away with the garland from ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church

... one of the loveliest prints ever beheld. We have had our laugh at The Portrait, a scene from Foote, painted by Smirke, and engraved by Portbury. Its whim and humour is describable only by the British Aristophanes. We can only add, that it is Lady Pentweazle sitting to Carmine for her portrait—the look that he despairs of imitating, as we do ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 402, Supplementary Number (1829) • Various

... no longer frightened by the majestic and warning voice that rises from the ruins of antiquity: here every one is welcomed with open arms, including even him who never arrived at any uncommon impression or noteworthy thought after a perusal of Sophocles and Aristophanes, with the result that they end in an etymological tangle, or are seduced into collecting the fragments of out-of-the-way dialects—and their time is spent in associating and dissociating, collecting and scattering, and running hither and thither consulting books. ...
— On the Future of our Educational Institutions • Friedrich Nietzsche

... of peculiar excellence, which the ancients attached to this flower, arose a pretty proverbial expression, used by Aristophanes, according to ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al

... have had many eminent scholars, two of them Greek professors, to wit, Barnes, and the present Mr. Scholefield, the latter of whom attained an extraordinary succession of University honors. The rest are Markland; Middleton, late Bishop of Calcutta; and Mitchell, the translator of "Aristophanes." Christ-Hospital, I believe, toward the close of the last century, and the beginning of the present, sent out more living writers, in its proportion, than any other school. There was Dr. Richards, author of the "Aboriginal Britons;" Dyer, whose life was one unbroken dream of learning ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various

... stoicism, that he could stand it as long as the frogs and the Jews could; so the programme was changed. The frog is a diligent songster, having a good voice but no ear. The libretto of his favorite opera, as written by Aristophanes, is brief, simple and effective—"brekekex-koax"; the music is apparently by that eminent composer, Richard Wagner. Horses have a frog in each hoof—a thoughtful provision of nature, enabling them to shine in a ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce

... of purpose; becomes aggressive, attacks now the throne, now the church, now the law, now the institution, now the person. Tragedy is followed by comedy, sentiment by satire; schylus is followed by Aristophanes, Horace is followed by Juvenal and Martial; Racine is followed by Voltaire, and Byron by Dickens. This is ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin

... more than hideousness and squalor, there is bestiality; yet the piece is a superb poetic success. It has a breadth, truth, and power which make the famous scene in Auerbach's Cellar, of Goethe's Faust, seem artificial and tame beside it, and which are only matched by Shakespeare and Aristophanes. ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various

... scent it makes," in a phrase of her creator's which, though in the actual context it does not refer to her, yet exquisitely conveys her influence on these two works. "Rosy Balaustion": she is that, as well as "superb, statuesque," in the admiring apostrophes from Aristophanes, during the long, close argument of the Apology. In that piece, the Bald Bard himself is made to show her to us; and though it follows, not precedes, the Adventure, I shall steal from him at once, presenting in his lyric phrases our queen ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne

... The missionaries found many more stars marked in the Chinese charts of the heavens than formerly existed in those which were in use in Europe. Suidas, at the word {Greek} (glass), indicates, in explaining a passage in Aristophanes, that burning mirrors were occasionally made of glass. Now how can we suppose burning mirrors to have been made of glass without supposing the magnifying powers of glass to have been known? The Greeks, as Plutarch affirms, employed metallic mirrors, either ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton

... poets, Euripides is the woman-hater: he loved to make women the object of attacks in his dramas. What all he twitted them with appears best from the speech that a Greek woman flings at him in the "Thesmophoria" of Aristophanes. She says ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel

... his character by making a speech. Then he proceeds to divide his accusers into two classes; first, there is the nameless accuser—public opinion. All the world from their earliest years had heard that he was a corrupter of youth, and had seen him caricatured in the Clouds of Aristophanes. Secondly, there are the professed accusers, who are but the mouth-piece of the others. The accusations of both might be summed up in a formula. The first say, 'Socrates is an evil-doer and a curious person, searching into things ...
— Apology - Also known as "The Death of Socrates" • Plato

... jokes, and, what is still more strange, the mist of unbelief is rising from the heads of those who, in the nature of things, ought to bow down reverently. Finally there will come a gifted sceptic, a second Heine, to spit and trample on the idol, as in his time did Aristophanes; he will not, however, trample on it in the name of old ideals, but in the name of freedom of thought, in the name of freedom of doubt; and what will happen then I do not know. Most likely on the huge, clean-wiped slate ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz

... noted entire phrases in Poignave; but the young man whom I interrogated spoke so quick that I could not seize the division of the words, and should have mixed them confusedly together had I attempted to write them down.* (* For a curious example of this, see the speech of Artabanes in Aristophanes (Acharn. act 1 scene 3) where a Greek has attempted to give a Persian oration. See also Gibbon's Roman Empire chapter 53 note 54, for a curious example of the way in which foreign languages have been disfigured when it ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt

... are chiefly owing to the following causes:—The universality of his genius was, perhaps, a disadvantage to his single works; the variety of his resources, sometimes diverting him from applying them to the most effectual purposes. He might be said to combine the powers of AEschylus and Aristophanes, of Dante and Rabelais, in his own mind. If he had been only half what he was, he would perhaps have appeared greater. The natural ease and indifference of his temper made him sometimes less scrupulous than ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt

... ass kicked me would you have me kick it back?" Not that the young fellow committed this outrage on Socrates with impunity, for as all reviled him and nicknamed him the kicker, he hung himself. And when Aristophanes brought his "Clouds" on the stage, and bespattered Socrates with his gibes and flouts, and one of the spectators said, "Aren't you vexed, Socrates, at his exhibiting you on the stage in this comic light?" he answered, "Not I, by Zeus, for I look upon the theatre as only ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch

... merriment, the uncontrollable, exuberant joyousness, the humour arising from good humour, not, as it often does, from ill humour, the incarnation, so to say, of the principle of mirth, in Shakespeare, and Cervantes, and Aristophanes; and as a wreath of flowers to crown the whole, there was the heavenly purity and starlike loveliness of his Genoveva. Had the rest of Tieck's life kept pace with the fertility of the six years from 1798 to 1804, he must have been beyond all rivalry ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey

... eares, or like a Mercury to charme ! Nature her selfe was proud of his designes, And joy'd to weare the dressing of his lines ! Which were so richly spun, and woven so fit, As, since, she will vouchsafe no other Wit. The merry Greeke, tart Aristophanes, Neat Terence, witty Plautus, now not please;But antiquated, and deserted lye As they were not of Natures family. Yet must I not give Nature all: Thy Art, My gentle Shakespeare, must enjoy a part; For though the Poets matter, Nature be, His Art doth give the fashion. And, that he, Who casts to ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare

... things, honest or dishonest, possible or impossible, and rivaling each other in pandering to the meanest feelings and most ignorant prejudices of the vulgarest part of the crowd. The auction between Cleon and the sausage-seller in Aristophanes is a fair caricature of what would be always going on. Such an institution would be a perpetual blister applied to the most peccant parts of human nature. It amounts to offering 658 prizes for the most successful flatterer, the most adroit misleader of ...
— Considerations on Representative Government • John Stuart Mill

... Milkmaid and her Pot of Milk, which gave rise to our popular saying, "Don't count your chickens until they be hatched." Nevertheless, genuine fables of Esop were current in Athens at the best period of its literary history, though it does not appear that they existed in writing during his lifetime. Aristophanes represents a character in one of his plays as learning Esop's fables from oral recitation. When first reduced to writing they were in prose, and Socrates is said to have turned some of them into verse, his ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston

... same month that Miss Lucy in Town appeared at Drury Lane, Millar published it in book form. In the following June, T. Waller of the Temple-Cloisters issued the first of a contemplated series of translations from Aristophanes by Henry Fielding, Esq., and the Rev. William Young who sat for Parson Adams. The play chosen was Plutus, the God of Riches, and a notice upon the original cover stated that, according to the reception it met with from the public, it would be followed by the others. ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson

... things which he has to give away; and this often happens to a man who has had no opportunities of seeing the world, whose parents were in very humble life, and who has given up all his thoughts to the Frogs of Aristophanes and the Targum of Onkelos. How is it possible that such a man should not lose his head? that he should not swell? that lie should not be guilty of a thousand follies, and worry and tease to death (before he recovers his common sense) a hundred men as good, and ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell

... in the New York Times it was said that the men and the times of Aristophanes were much more modern than the administration of Rutherford B. Hayes. But this was simply because Aristophanes immortally portrayed the undying things in human nature, whereas the issues associated ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various

... figures of the Parthenon frieze, or like those marvellous goddesses who sat in the triangular pediments of the same building? If you judge from the art, they certainly were so. But read an authority, like Aristophanes, for instance. You will find that the Athenian ladies laced tightly, wore high-heeled shoes, dyed their hair yellow, painted and rouged their faces, and were exactly like any silly fashionable or fallen creature of our own day. The fact is that ...
— Selected Prose of Oscar Wilde - with a Preface by Robert Ross • Oscar Wilde

... that he had left out, disembowelled, or indicated only by asterisks, several indecent words and some indecent phrases. An outrage, Jacob said; a breach of faith; sheer prudery; token of a lewd mind and a disgusting nature. Aristophanes and Shakespeare were cited. Modern life was repudiated. Great play was made with the professional title, and Leeds as a seat of learning was laughed to scorn. And the extraordinary thing was that these young men were perfectly right—extraordinary, because, even as ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf

... in the temples of the same Deities; whose servant he professed himself to be. Hence Porphyry assures us, [184][Greek: Hou paizon homodoulous autou elegen tous kuknous (Sokrates)], that Socrates was very serious when he mentioned swans as his fellow-servants. When, therefore, Aristophanes speaks of the [185]Delian and Pythian swans, they are the priests of those places, to whom he alludes. And when it is said by Plato, that the soul of Orpheus, out of disgust to womankind, led the life of a [186]swan, the meaning certainly is, that he ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume II. (of VI.) • Jacob Bryant

... doubtless even this was far enough away. And still more was I struck by the resemblance when a comedy succeeded to the tragedy, and I found the young and old Japan confronting one another exactly as the young and old Athens met in debate, two thousand years ago, in the Frogs of Aristophanes. The theme was an ascent of Mount Fuji; the actors two groups of young girls, one costumed as virgin priestesses of the Shinto cult, the other in modern European dress. The one set were climbing the mountain as a pilgrimage, the other as a lark; and they ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson

... imputation of being a conjuror, which character clung to him through life. This opinion was much strengthened by an accident which, he says, happened soon after his removal from St John's College, and his being chosen a fellow of Trinity. "Hereupon," he continues, "I did set forth a Greek comedy of Aristophanes, named in Greek [Greek: Heirene] with the performance of the Scarabaeus, or beetle—his flying up to Jupiter's palace with a man and his basket of victuals on her back; whereat was great wondering, and many vain reports ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby

... quarter—"I had to refer the other day to Aristophanes, and came by chance on a curious Speaking-pot story in the Vespae, which I had ...
— Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam • Omar Khayyam

... week sent me by an unknown hand, a passage out of Plato,[3] with some hints how to apply it. That author puts a fable into the mouth of Aristophanes, with an account of the original of love. That, mankind was at first created with four arms and legs, and all other parts double to what they are now; till Jupiter, as a punishment for his sins, cleft ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift

... In dramatic composition, Aristophanes is perpetually hooking in parodies of Euripides, whom of all poets he hated, as well as of AEschylus, Sophocles, and other tragic bards. Since, at length, that Grecian wit has found a translator saturated with his genius, and an interpreter as philosophical, the subject of Grecian ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli

... their snowy plumage to the brown of summer, and presenting a curious piebald appearance, were there in great numbers, cackling their guttural cry with its concluding notes closely resembling the "ko-ax, ko-ax" of the Frogs' Chorus in the comedy of Aristophanes; snipe whistled and curlews whirled all about us. Half-way across to the McKinley Fork it began to rain, thunder-peal succeeding thunder-peal, and each crash announcing a heavier downpour. Soon we were all wet through, and then the rain turned to hail that fell smartly until ...
— The Ascent of Denali (Mount McKinley) - A Narrative of the First Complete Ascent of the Highest - Peak in North America • Hudson Stuck

... immortals, but they are few and far between; most classics are as great impostors dead as they were when living, and while posing as gods are, five-sevenths of them, only Struldbrugs. It comforts me to remember that Aristophanes liked AEschylus no better than I do. True, he praises him by comparison with Sophocles and Euripides, but he only does so that he may run down these last more effectively. Aristophanes is a safe ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler

... with rare stoicism, self-defence, and wisdom in one so young, he actually sat down to read hard for his first class. Now, to do this, he wanted the Ethics, Politics, and Rhetoric of Aristotle, certain dialogues of Plato, the Comedies of Aristophanes, the first-class Historians, Demosthenes, Lucretius, a Greek Testament, Wheeler's Analysis, Prideaux, Horne, and several books of reference sacred and profane. But he could not get these books without Dr. Wycherley, and unfortunately he had cut that ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade

... belonged to the class most inaccessible to men of Odo's rank: the only class in Italy in which the wife's fidelity was as much esteemed as the innocence of the girl. Such principles had long been ridiculed by persons of quality and satirised by poets and playwrights. From Aristophanes to Beaumarchais the cheated husband and the outwitted guardian had been the figures on which the dramatist relied for his comic effects. Even the miser tricked out of his savings was a shade less ridiculous, less grotesquely ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton

... was done, they must needs have been able to do it themselves. Thus Callimachus, the favourite of Ptolemy Philadelphus, and librarian of his Museum, is the most distinguished grammarian, critic, and poet of his day, and has for pupils Eratosthenes, Apollonius Rhodius, Aristophanes of Byzantium, and a goodly list more. He is an encyclopaedia in himself. There is nothing the man does not know, or probably, if we spoke more correctly, nothing he does not know about. He writes on history, on the Museum, on barbarous names, on the wonders of the world, on ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley

... if the religion of Greece ever had that hold upon the feelings of the people, artists, or their patrons, which is implied in the supposition, that it was an efficient cause. A people that could listen to the broad farce of Aristophanes, and witness every sort of contempt thrown upon the deities they professed to worship, were not likely to seek in religion the advancement of art; and their licentious liberty—if liberty it deserved ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various

... prime, When, like Apollo, he came forth to warm Our ears, or like a Mercury, to charm! Nature herself was proud of his designs, And joy'd to wear the dressing of his lines, Which were so richly spun, and woven so fit, As, since, she will vouchsafe no other wit. The merry Greek, tart Aristophanes, Neat Terence, witty Plautus, now not please; But antiquated and deserted lie, As they were not of nature's family, Yet must I not give nature all; thy art, My gentle Shakspeare, must enjoy a part, For though the poet's matter nature be, His art doth give the fashion; and, that he Who ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan

... Greece had her Aristophanes; Rome her Juvenal; Spain has had her Cervantes; France her Rabelais, her Moliere, her Voltaire; Germany her Jean Paul, her Heine; England her Swift, her Thackeray; and America has her Lowell. By the side of all those great masters of satire, though kept somewhat in the rear by provincialism of style ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell

... aleiterion stephanoun],' the writer well remembering that Mr. Smith insisted particularly on the extraordinary force and beauty of the word, '[Greek: episkeptontas].'" I, also, have often heard him quote long passages from the Greek dramatists, particularly from "Aristophanes," really impromptu, and with as much facility and vivacity as if he had been reading English. I have already intimated that he read many of the new publications of the day. One of these was Mr. Macaulay's ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various

... asking him what punishment he thought he deserved; and according to the nature of his answer they mitigated or increased his punishment. Tho Commentators quote a similar passage from the Frogs of Aristophanes.] ...
— The Comedies of Terence - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Notes • Publius Terentius Afer, (AKA) Terence

... seminaries found a splendid culmination. Yearly, in the academic theatre, took place a series of representations, by students, of marvellous pomp and elaboration. The school and college plays were of various characters. Sometimes they were from Terence, Plautus, or Aristophanes; sometimes modifications of the ancient mysteries, meant to enforce the Evangelical theology; sometimes comedies full of the contemporary life. There are several men that have earned mention in the history of German literature by writing plays for ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer

... seen but by now living, or lately living eyes. It is not yet twenty years that this—I may well call it, wonderful, cloud has been, in its essence, recognizable. There is no description of it, so far as I have read, by any ancient observer. Neither Homer nor Virgil, neither Aristophanes nor Horace, acknowledge any such clouds among those compelled by Jove. Chaucer has no word of them, nor Dante;[1] Milton none, nor Thomson. In modern times, Scott, Wordsworth and Byron are alike unconscious of them; and the most observant and descriptive of scientific men, ...
— The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century - Two Lectures delivered at the London Institution February - 4th and 11th, 1884 • John Ruskin

... that friendship is the greatest good which can happen to any city, as nothing so much prevents seditions: and amity in a city is what Socrates commends above all things, which appears to be, as indeed he says, the effect of friendship; as we learn from Aristophanes in the Erotics, who says, that those who love one another from the excess of that passion, desire to breathe the same soul, and from being two to be blended into one: from whence it would necessarily follow, that both or one of them must be destroyed. But now in a city which admits of this community, ...
— Politics - A Treatise on Government • Aristotle

... first writer who noticed the fact that, where good money and bad money are thown into circulation together, the bad money drives out the good money, was Aristophanes. He seems to have thought that the preference which his fellow citizens gave to light coins was to be attributed to a depraved taste such as led them to entrust men like Cleon and Hyperbolus with the conduct of great affairs. But, though his political economy will not ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... "Life" is not enough; it merely hitches us along from day to day and keeps our courage up. We want in America a literature, we want the thing done thoroughly and forever and once for all. We want an Aristophanes, a master who shall go gloriously laughing through our world, through our chimneys and blind machines, pot-bellied fortunes, empty successes, all these tiny, queer little men of wind and bladder, until we have a nation filled with a divine laughter, ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee

... cowardice and fear of failure give up his office of general, and give his personal enemy such an opportunity of exalting himself at his expense, depriving himself voluntarily of his honourable charge. Aristophanes sneers at him in his play of the 'Birds,' ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch

... in the course of some literary criticisms of his, turned his thoughts to the subject of puns. He at once plunged into the history of puns. He quoted Aristophanes, Plautus, Terence, Cicero. He brought forward illustrations from Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Milton, Puritan, writers, Congreve, Cowper, and others, until he concluded with Hood, who he declared had first unfolded to the human mind the ...
— The Lady of the Ice - A Novel • James De Mille

... any valuable opinion on a subject on which I am very imperfectly informed, and which, save as a matter of political necessity, fails to interest me—for, personally, I think that a book of the Iliad or a play of Aristophanes is far more valuable than all the lucubrations that have ever been spun by the subtle minds of learned Hindu Pundits—but, so far as I am able to judge, Dr. Barth's description is quite accurate. None the less, the importance to the Indian politician of gaining some ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring

... the warm and not the cold bath was esteemed by the ancient Greeks for its invigorating properties may be inferred from a dialogue of Aristophanes, in which one of the characters says, 'I think none of the sons of the gods ever exceeded Hercules in bodily and mental force.' Upon which the other asks, 'Where didst thou ever see a cold bath dedicated ...
— Intestinal Ills • Alcinous Burton Jamison

... it, however, for me, unless some exigence requires it. Your papers I will shew you certainly when you would see them, but I am a little angry at you for not keeping minutes of your own acceptum et expensum[1122], and think a little time might be spared from Aristophanes, for the res familiares. Forgive me for I mean well. I hope, dear Sir, that you and Lady Rothes, and all the young people, too many to enumerate, are well and happy. GOD ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell

... century B.C. such names as Themistocles and Pericles in government, Phidias and Myron in art, Herodotus and Thucydides in historical narrative, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides in tragic drama, and Aristophanes in ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY

... often, though not necessarily, a physician. The Chief was appointed annually. From Caton's excellent sketch(15) you can get a good idea of the ritual, but still better is the delightful description given in the "Plutus" of Aristophanes. After offering honey-cakes and baked meats on the altar, the suppliants ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler

... Erinna, who, with her three hundred verses, challenged the fame of the brightest light of Greece, and counterbalanced with her one small volume, called the "Elecate," the ponderous "Iliad" of the great Homer. Aristophanes celebrates Carissena, a votary of the same profession, as a woman of great excellence and learning; and the same may be said for Teano, Merone, Polla, Elpe, Cornificia, and Telesilla, to the last of whom, in honour of her marvellous talents, a most ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 05 ( of 10) Andrea da Fiesole to Lorenzo Lotto • Giorgio Vasari

... instead of going on board ships, quoting the legend that Athene and Poseidon had a contest for the possession of the land, and that she gained a decision in her favour by the production of the sacred olive. Themistokles, on the other hand, did not so much "stick Peiraeus on to Athens," as Aristophanes the comic poet said, as make the city dependent upon Peiraeus, and the land dependent on the sea. By this means he transferred power from the nobles to the people, because sailors and pilots became the real strength of the State. For this reason the thirty ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch

... times—that they are all costly.[71] This, however, is not essentially the fault of the governments. If nations choose to play at war, they will always find their governments willing to lead the game, and soon coming under that term of Aristophanes, "[Greek: kapeloi aspidon]," "shield-sellers." And when ([Greek: pem epi pemati])[72] the shields take the form of iron ships, with apparatus "for defence against liquid fire,"—as I see by latest accounts they are now arranging ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin

... and supplies traits of Socrates; whilst Plato's has merits of every kind,—being a repertory of the wisdom of the ancients on the subject of love,—a picture of a feast of wits, not less descriptive than Aristophanes,— and, lastly, containing that ironical eulogy of Socrates which is the source from which all the portraits of that head current in Europe ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various

... not high, were perhaps even low, and though the terms they employed were usually common and popular and conveying no impression of refinement, by the mere harmony of their composition have attained dignity and elevation, and avoided the appearance of meanness. Such among many others are Philistus, Aristophanes occasionally, Euripides almost always. ...
— On the Sublime • Longinus

... that the advocates of William Shakspere, Gent, as author of the plays, differ like the Kilkenny cats among themselves on many points. All do not believe, with Mr. J. C. Collins, that Will knew Sophocles, Euripides, and AEschylus (but not Aristophanes) as well as Mr. Swinburne did, or knew them at all—for that matter. Mr. Pollard differs very widely from Sir Sidney Lee on points concerning the First Folio and the Quartos: my sympathies are with Mr. Pollard. Few, if any, partisans of Will ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang

... prone on his bed in Paris: "The wittiest sarcasms of mortals are only an attempt at jesting when compared with those of the great Author of the Universe—the Aristophanes ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard

... for the theatre. In all periods, certain contributions to the drama have been journalistic in motive and intention, while certain others have been literary. There is a good deal of journalism in the comedies of Aristophanes. He often chooses topics mainly for their timeliness, and gathers and says what happens to be in the air. Many of the Elizabethan dramatists, like Dekker and Heywood and Middleton for example, looked at life with the journalistic ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton

... be truly considered "lower," natural distinctions were better appreciated, and there seemed to be something absurd in the idea of their thinking or talking. Hence AEsop's fables are spoken of by Aristophanes as something laughable, and the fabulist came to be regarded as a humorist. This feeling gained ground so much afterwards that Lucian makes AEsop act the part of a buffoon in "The Isles of the Blessed." Such views no doubt influenced the traditions ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange

... which a door could be locked from the outside, but not from within. According to some, this key was called "Laconica," from its rough appearance, in allusion to the inelegant exterior of the Spartans. In his Thesmophoriazusae, Aristophanes informs us that these ...
— The Captiva and The Mostellaria • Plautus

... writers of antiquity. 'Boys,' he remarked, 'do not like poetry.' Perhaps his own poetical taste was a little dubious; at any rate, it is certain that he considered the Greek Tragedians greatly overrated, and that he ranked Propertius as 'an indifferent poet'. As for Aristophanes, owing to his strong moral disapprobation, he could not bring himself to read him until he was forty, when, it is true, he was much struck by the 'Clouds'. But Juvenal, the Doctor could never bring himself to read ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey

... afforded him created a universal ridicule for religion; but his unbelief evinced no seriousness, no sadness. His humour itself is a type of the man. Lacking the bitter earnestness which gave sting to the wit of Aristophanes, and the courteous playfulness exhibited in the many-sided genius of Plato, he was a caricaturist rather than a painter: his dialogues are farces of life rather than satires. It has been well remarked, that human society ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar

... the object of his passion. But the companion of the Olympic goddess is the Eros who fills the hearts of the lovers with the longing for virtue. The other Eros is the confederate of the debased Aphrodite." And Aristophanes, another of the participators in the feast, says: "The yearning does not seem to be a desire for the pleasures of the senses, the one taking delight in his intercourse with the other; far from it, it is obvious that each soul is craving for something ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka

... translations of the plays of Plautus, all of Terence, the Clouds and Plutus of Aristophanes, she published her translation of the Iliad and Odyssey (1711-1716), which gave her a prominent place in the history of French literature, especially as it appeared at the time of the "quarrels of the ancients and moderns," ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme

... and sustained by that righteous indignation which must lie at the heart of all true satire—as a realisation, in short, of the classical ideal of comedy—there had been nothing like Jonson's comedy since the days of Aristophanes. "Every Man in His Humour," like the two plays that follow it, contains two kinds of attack, the critical or generally satiric, levelled at abuses and corruptions in the abstract; and the personal, in which specific application is made of all this in the lampooning of poets and ...
— The Poetaster - Or, His Arraignment • Ben Jonson

... the main subject of the Secchia Rapita; and such is Tassoni's irony, an irony worthy of Aristophanes in its far-reaching indulgent contempt for human circumstance. But the poem has another object. It was written to punish Count Alessandro Brusantini. The leading episode, which occupies about three cantos of the twelve, is an elaborate vilification of this personal enemy travestied as the contemptible ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds

... foremost student of his age; and some of his translations are said to be superior to any before offered for competition in the University. While there he made poetical paraphrases of the most celebrated Greek poets; of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Aristophanes, which were thought efforts of extraordinary promise. Dr. Millar at that time gave philosophical lectures in Glasgow. He was a highly gifted teacher, and excellent man. His lectures attracted the attention of young Campbell, who became his pupil, and studied with eagerness the principles of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 407, December 24, 1829. • Various

... flagitiosum obscenum (vulgar, spiteful, shameful, coarse), alterum elegans urbanum ingeniosum facetum (in good taste, gracious, clever, witty). Quo genere non modo Plautus noster et Atticorum antiqua comoedia (i.e. of Aristophanes), sed etiam philosophorum Socraticorum libri referti sunt. —De Off. ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce

... bound to admit, that, if any writings whatever were to be suppressed on that ground, the writings of Rabelais are certainly entitled to be of the number. It is safe to say that never, no, not even in the boundless license of the comedy of Aristophanes, was more flagrant indecency, and indecency proportionately more redundant in volume, perpetrated in literature, than was done by Rabelais. Indecency, however, it is, rather than strict lasciviousness. Rabelais sinned against manners, more than he sinned against morals. But ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson

... fidelity" with "the wicked wretch Aman—a stranger received of us ... his falsehood and cunning"—the whole of both letters being carefully attuned to the respective key-notes—is worthy of any one of the best ironists from Aristophanes to the ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury

... embellished in my absence, and the last division of books, which followed my steps, increased my chosen library to the number of between six and seven thousand volumes. My seraglio was ample, my choice was free, my appetite was keen. After a full repast on Homer and Aristophanes, I involved myself in the philosophic maze of the writings of Plato, of which the dramatic is, perhaps, more interesting than the argumentative part: but I stepped aside into every path of inquiry which ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon

... carry Theodorus with me; nor have they any dictionaries but Hesichius and Dioscerides. They esteem Plutarch highly, and were much taken with Lucian's wit and with his pleasant way of writing. As for the poets, they have Aristophanes, Homer, Euripides, and Sophocles of Aldus's edition; and for historians, Thucydides, Herodotus, and Herodian. One of my companions, Thricius Apinatus, happened to carry with him some of Hippocrates's works and Galen's Microtechne, which they hold in great estimation; for though there is no ...
— Utopia • Thomas More

... utmost perfection possible to human genius. Art was represented by the inimitable creations of Phidias and Polygnotus. The drama was illustrated by the incomparable tragedies of AEschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and by the comedies of Aristophanes, while the writing of the world's annals had become an art in the graceful narrations ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers

... it not for the fact that Ben Jonson made it the subject of his satire in one of his most humorous plays, "The Devil is an Ass." In it he turns the last-mentioned peculiarity to good account; for when Fitzdottrell, in the fifth act, feigns madness, and quotes Aristophanes, and speaks in Spanish and French, the judicious Sir Paul Eithersides comes to the conclusion that "it is the devil by ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding

... B.B. Rogers in his translations of Aristophanes has of course no other pronunciation. His verses are too good to be spoiled by what began as a vulgarism. Another equally recent vulgarism, not recognized by the N.E.D. and bad enough to make George Russell turn in his grave, is 'm['a]gazine' for 'magaz['i]ne'. It is not yet ...
— Society for Pure English Tract 4 - The Pronunciation of English Words Derived from the Latin • John Sargeaunt

... A bad musician, frequently ridiculed by Aristophanes; he played both the lyre and ...
— The Acharnians • Aristophanes

... been mothers, and who suckle their children, acquire a considerable volume, that they continue to give milk as long as they suckle their infants, and that their milk does not fail until they cease to nourish them."[53] So well, indeed, was this fact known to the ancients, that Aristophanes uses the expression, [Greek: pôosthên mikran], penem exiguum, as an attribute of a youth who has preserved his innocence and [Greek: kôlên megalên], penem magnum, as the sign of a ...
— Aphrodisiacs and Anti-aphrodisiacs: Three Essays on the Powers of Reproduction • John Davenport

... malignity of disposition, but to an exquisite sense of propriety, an honest indignation of depravity, and a generous desire to reform the degenerated manners of his fellow-creatures. This has been the cause of Aristophanes censuring the pedantry and superstition of Socrates; Horace, Persius, Martial, and Juvenal, the luxury and profligacy of the Romans; Boileau and Moliere the levity and refinement of the French; Cervantes the romantic pride and madness ...
— A Lecture On Heads • Geo. Alex. Stevens

... kinds, which, confined in a close place, nevertheless, each selects its own class, and those of a kindred race separate themselves from the rest. A single age sufficed to illustrate Tragedy, in the persons of AEschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides: ancient comedy under Cratinus, Aristophanes, and Eumolpides, and in like manner the new comedy under Menander, Diphilus, and Philemon. There appeared few philosophers of note after the days of Plato and Aristotle, and whoever has made himself acquainted with Isocrates and his school, is acquainted with the summit ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner

... theory," says the master, "and I allow you have made a fair case for yourself. But now, in such books as Aristophanes, for instance, you've been reading a play this half ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes

... Homer, I would say in a degree, but somewhat lower, of those great Ancients who are the most accessible to us in English—AEschylus, Aristophanes, Virgil, and Horace. What I have said of Shakespeare I would say of Calderon, of Moliere, of Corneille, of Racine, of Voltaire, of Alfieri, of Goethe, of those dramatists, in many forms, and with genius ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various

... after all, that prince was a Christian, and a Christian amongst Mussulmans. But what are we to think of Achilles and Patroclus, when described as being (or not being) "under convictions of sin"?] from Aristophanes, and from the Greek tragedians, embodying at intervals this word sin, are more extravagant than would be the word category introduced into the harangue of an Indian sachem amongst the Cherokees; and finally that the very nearest approach to the abysmal idea which we Christians ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey

... a failure he was, so far as his Athens was concerned. True, Athenian artistic judgment triumphed presently over the Athenian spite. Though it was the rule that no successful play should be performed more than once, they decreed that 'revivals' of Aeschylus should always be in order. And Aristophanes testifies to his lasting popularity—when he shows little Tomides with a bad grouch over seeing a play by Theognis, when he had gone to the theater "expecting Aeschylus";—and when he shows Aeschylus and ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris

... anticipator as he was of the Protestant Christian aera,—should have given in his Dialogue of the Banquet, a justification of our Shakespeare. For he relates that, when all the other guests had either dispersed or fallen asleep, Socrates only, together with Aristophanes and Agathon, remained awake, and that, while he continued to drink with them out of a large goblet, he compelled them, though most reluctantly, to admit that it was the business of one and the same genius to excel in tragic and comic poetry, or that ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge

... which exceed in bulk the combined work of Aeschylus and Sophocles. All classes of writers quoted him, philosophers, orators, bishops. In his own lifetime Socrates made a point of witnessing his plays; the very violence of Aristophanes' attack proves Euripides' potent influence; his lost drama Melanippe turned the heads of the Athenians, the whole town singing its odes. Survivors of the Sicilian disaster won their freedom by singing his songs to their ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb

... the greatest noise; in which his curtain, when it was still quite new, had certainly an uncommonly charming effect. Oeser had taken the Muses out of the clouds, upon which they usually hover on such occasions, and set them upon the earth. The statues of Sophocles and Aristophanes, around whom all the modern dramatic writers were assembled, adorned a vestibule to the Temple of Fame. Here, too, the goddesses of the arts were likewise present; and all was dignified and beautiful. But now comes the oddity! Through ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

... when I am sentimental and reflective; not just now. The ludicrous has its place in the universe; it is not a human invention, but one of the divine ideas, illustrated in the practical jokes of kittens and monkeys long before Aristophanes or Shakespeare. How curious it is that we always consider solemnity and the absence of all gay surprises and encounter of wits as essential to the idea of the future life of those whom we thus deprive of half their faculties, and then call ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland

... upon the vetus comaedia of Aristophanes, which was satirical in purpose, and they belonged to an entirely different school from Shakspere's. They were classical and not romantic, and were pure comedies, admitting {121} no admixture of tragic motives. There is hardly one lovely or beautiful character in the ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers

... Complete Concordance to the Comedies and Fragments of Aristophanes. By Henry Dunbar, ...
— How to Form a Library, 2nd ed • H. B. Wheatley

... in his more innocent pranks. His indecencies are all, indeed, in print, but fortunately scattered, and it would be a groveling nature that should seek to collect them; yet the absence of this chapter from the world's book of humor means the omission of a comic strain that neither Aristophanes nor Rabelais has surpassed. Even as I write, a newspaper misprint assures me that typesetting machines are no protection against the Imp of the Perverted. Perhaps we may be pardoned the reproduction of one of the mildest ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman

... very stupid and ignorant, the fable of his preference of the music of Pan to that of Apollo was invented, to which was added, perhaps, as a mark of his stupidity, that the God gave him a pair of asses' ears. The scholiast of Aristophanes, to explain the story, says either it was intended to shew that Midas, like the ass, was very quick of hearing, or in other words, had numerous spies in all parts of his dominions; or, it was invented, because his usual place of residence was called Onouta, onou ota, ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso

... soul-phase of the later Renaissance, but of every individual and of every civilization which on life's dangerous and orgiastic substratum has reared a mere garden of delight. Living hearts throb to the music penned by the dead hand of Mozart and of Beethoven; the clownings of Aristophanes arouse laughter in our music halls; Euripides is as subtle and world-weary as any modern; the philosophies of Parminides and Heraclitus are recrudescent in that of Bergson; and Plato discusses higher space under ...
— Four-Dimensional Vistas • Claude Fayette Bragdon

... entirely without. He seems instead to have been haunted in the play of his mental action by a spectre, never entirely laid from first to last, (Greek scholars, I believe, find the same mocking and fantastic apparition attending Aristophanes, his comedies,)—the spectre ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman

... a play of Aeschylus should "receive a chorus,'' i.e. be officially allowed to produce the drama at the Dionysia. The existence of this decree, mentioned in the Life, is strongly confirmed by two passages in Aristophanes: first in the prologue of the Acharnians (which was acted in 425, thirty-one years after the poet's death), where the citizen, grumbling about his griefs and troubles, relates his great disappointment, when he took his seat in the theatre "expecting Aeschylus,'' ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... Aristophanes are, perhaps, best known to English readers by Hookham Frere's excellent translations. His first volume, containing the 'Acharnians,' the 'Knights,' and the 'Birds,' was originally printed at Malta in 1839, in which year a similar quarto volume containing the 'Frogs' ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan

... master in its great chief, with whom he seems to have been personally connected. Nor does he ever court popularity by bringing the personages of the heroic age down to the common level. He, as well as Aeschylus, is dear to Aristophanes, the satiric poet of conservatism, while ...
— Specimens of Greek Tragedy - Aeschylus and Sophocles • Goldwin Smith

... heavily upon me. The Great Author of the Universe, the Aristophanes of Heaven, was bent on demonstrating with crushing force to me, the little earthly so-called German Aristophanes, how my weightiest sarcasms are only pitiful attempts at jesting in comparison with His, and how miserably I am beneath Him in humor, in ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... myself in something stronger, I reread the great, the most holy, the incomparable Aristophanes. There is a man, that fellow! What a world in ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert

... came to me to walk into the City, where he had business, and then to buy books at Bateman's; and I laid out one pound five shillings for a Strabo and Aristophanes, and I have now got books enough to make me another shelf, and I will have more, or it shall cost me a fall; and so as we came back, we drank a flask of right French wine at Ben Tooke's chamber; and when I got home, Mrs. Vanhomrigh sent me word her eldest daughter(4) ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift

... our very knowledge. "Who is it that sends the rain? Who is it that thunders?" old Strepsiades asks of Socrates in The Clouds of Aristophanes, and the philosopher replies: "Not Zeus, but the clouds." "But," questions Strepsiades, "who but Zeus makes the clouds sweep along?" to which Socrates answers: "Not a bit of it; it is atmospheric ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno

... Iliad of Homer—to expect that reverence for the Supreme Being which the Bible has taught us in the Metamorphoses of Ovid—or to seek that refinement of manners and language which has only of late prevailed amongst us, in the plays of Aristophanes and Plautus—were very foolish and very vain. In ages not so ancient, and which have revolved since the dawn of Christianity, a certain coarseness of thought and language has been prevalent; and for it still larger allowance ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden

... later Sophocles increased the number of actors to three. When Euripides began to write his terrible tragedies in the middle of the fifth century, B.C., he was allowed as many actors as he liked and when Aristophanes wrote those famous comedies in which he poked fun at everybody and everything, including the Gods of Mount Olympus, the chorus had been reduced to the role of mere bystanders who were lined up behind ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon

... was capable of containing thirty thousand persons. It contained statues of all the great tragic and comic poets, the most conspicuous of which were naturally those of AEschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, among the former, and those of Aristophanes and Menander among the latter. On the southwest side of the Acropolis is the site of the Odeum, or musical theatre of Herodes Atticus, named by him the theatre of Regilla, in honor of his wife. On the northeast side of the Acropolis stood the ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various

... without reason, says Heine, is but a sneeze of the intelligence. But has not wit ever been the keenest weapon of the great emancipators of the human mind? Not the mere plaything of an idle mind in an idle hour, but the coruscating blade to pierce the weak places of folly and imposture. Aristophanes, Lucian, Rabelais, Erasmus, and Voltaire—to take a few great instances—were all serious in aim and intention. They valued truth, goodness, and beauty, as much as the dreariest preachers. But they felt, because of ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote

... to close its avenues of intrusion for a while; in the far past which has left us the great goddesses and other matrilineal survivals; in industrial Babylonia; in the Minoan palaces; in fifth-and fourth-century Greece, as Aristophanes joins with Euripides to admit, and Euripides with Plato to advocate; in the Femmes savantes of renascent Europe; in eighteenth-century France, which seemed to itself so impregnable; and in the fin-de-siecle Europe of yesterday, pulling down ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various

... French Revolution is not to be accepted as historical authority, it is profoundly stimulating and instructive, when we look on it as a lyrical apologue. It is an historical phantasmagoria—which, though hardly more literally true than Aristophanes' Knights or Clouds, may almost be placed beside these immortal satires for its imagination, wisdom, and insight. The personages and the events of the French Revolution in fact succeeded each other with such startling rapidity ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison

... bad puns in Aristophanes,' observed the archaeologist thoughtfully. 'Why don't you go to Crete?' he inquired very suddenly of ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford

... the only fortunate men. "It is upon us alone," says Aristophanes, "shineth the beneficent day-star. We alone receive pleasure from the influence of his rays; we, who are initiated, and who practise toward citizen and stranger every possible act of justice and piety." And it is therefore not ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike

... groups as he drew inspiration successively from the writers of the New Comedy (or Comedy of ordinary life) like Menander, from the satires of Menippus, and from writers of the Old Comedy (or Comedy of fantastic imagination) like Aristophanes. The best specimens of the first group are The Liar and the Dialogues of the Hetaerae; of the second, the Dialogues of the Dead and of the Gods, Menippus and Icaromenippus, Zeus cross-examined; of the third, Timon, ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata

... the highly-popular Celestina of Fernando de Rojas. The Latin plays were acted in schools. The first performance of a play in French belonging to the new tendency was that of Ronsard's translation of the Plutus of Aristophanes, in 1549, by his friends of the College de Coqueret. It was only by amateurs, and before a limited scholarly group of spectators, that the new classical tragedies could be presented. Gradually both tragedy and comedy came to be written solely ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden

... Browning's women, she is the most luminous, the most at unity with herself. She has the Greek gladness and life, the Greek intelligence and passion, and the Greek harmony. All that was common, prattling, coarse, sensual and spluttering in the Greek, (and we know from Aristophanes how strong these lower elements were in the Athenian people), never shows a trace of its influence in Balaustion. Made of the finest clay, exquisite and delicate in grain, she is yet strong, when the days of trouble come, to meet them nobly and to change ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke

... imagination, but copied from ancient authors. They may be found in Pliny, Hist. Nat., lib. vii., and were mentioned before his time by Ktesias, as well as by Hecataeus, according to Stephanus of Byzantium. Cf. Aristophanes, Aves, 1553; Julius Solinus, Polyhistor, ed. Salmasius, cap. 240. Just as these sheets are going to press there comes to me Mr. Perry's acute and learned History of Greek Literature, New York, 1890, in which this subject is mentioned in connection with the mendacious and medical Ktesias:—These ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske

... ornament and source of fresh delight. Like the songs of the Chorus, they bid us pause a moment over the wider laws and actions of human fate and human life, and we turn from your persons to yourself, and again from yourself to your persons, as from the odes of Sophocles or Aristophanes to the action of their characters on the stage. Nor, to my taste, does the mere music and melancholy dignity of your style in these passages of meditation fall far below the highest efforts of poetry. I ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang

... probably derived something of their skill from the East, (from the Lydians principally, whose cooks are much celebrated, [3]) and something from Egypt. A few hints concerning Cookery may be collected from Homer, Aristophanes, Aristotle, &c. but afterwards they possessed many authors on the subject, as may be seen in Athenus [4]. And as Ditetics were esteemed a branch of the study of medicine, as also they were afterwards [5], so many of those authors were Physicians; and the Cook was undoubtedly ...
— The Forme of Cury • Samuel Pegge

... delineations of national character, the indications of national taste, and the satirical scourgings of the follies of the day. A few observations are necessary as to its feeble beginnings. The old Greek drama indeed existed as a model, especially in the tragedies of Euripides and the comedies of Aristophanes; but until the fall of Constantinople, these were a dead letter to Western Europe, and when the study of Greek was begun in England, they were only open to men of the highest education and culture; whereas the drama designed for the people was to cater in its earlier ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee

... pace with which he was obliged to go over the classis ground at Grey Friars, scenting out each word and digging up every root in the way. Pen never liked to halt, but made his tutor construe when he was at fault, and thus galloped through the Iliad and the Odyssey and the charming, wicked Aristophanes. But he went so fast that though he certainly galloped through a considerable extent of the ancient country, he clean forgot it in after life. Besides the ancient poets, Pen read the English with great gusto. Smirke sighed and shook ...
— Boys and girls from Thackeray • Kate Dickinson Sweetser

... Lessons in Greek"—the first and only Greek book ever written by a Negro. This book was widely used by both the white and colored schools of the country, especially in the North. Professor Scarborough has also written a treatise entitled "The Birds of Aristophanes—a Theory of Interpretation"—aside from numerous tracts and pamphlets, covering a variety of subjects—classical, archaeological, sociological and racial. He has written many papers for various societies to which he belongs. ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various

... language of the men whose thoughts still charm the world, and who by its deft use gained for themselves and for their work immortality. It has little of the subtilty of expression, the variety of cadence, or the intellectual possibility, of the Greek of Homer, Plato, and Aristophanes. It is a language, moreover, crippled by the introduction of ecclesiastical and theological terms and phrases, which stubbornly refuse to lend themselves to classical rhythm. Such a language cannot be expected to have attraction for men to whom the ...
— Hymns of the Greek Church - Translated with Introduction and Notes • John Brownlie

... received notions of society and the sentimental literature of the day, alone against all the writers and readers of novels, to suggest this enquiry, would not the younger 'part of the world be ready to take off its coat and run at him might and main?' (Republic.) Yet, if like Peisthetaerus in Aristophanes, he could persuade the 'birds' to hear him, retiring a little behind a rampart, not of pots and dishes, but of unreadable books, he might have something to say for himself. Might he not argue, 'that a rational being should not follow the dictates of passion in the most ...
— Phaedrus • Plato

... his good pieces, is as superior to the pure but cold Terence, and to the droll Aristophanes, as to Dancourt ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire

... Homer, Sophocles, AEschylus, Thucydides, Aristophanes, Xenophon, Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, and the Works of Alexander the Great; the manners, habits, customs, usages, and the meditations of the Grecians; the Greek Digamma resolved, Prosody, Composition, both in prose and verse, ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton

... next the grose rootes be plainer. Under whom often tymes, Frogges will shadowe theim selues, from the heate of the daie: hoppyng and plaiyng vnder these leaues, whiche to them is a pleasaunt Tente or pauillion, saieth Aristophanes, whiche maie a plade (made a play), wherein Frogges made pastime. Bullein's Bulwarke, 1562, or, The booke of ...
— Early English Meals and Manners • Various

... ubiquitously throughout Greece, the regular symbol of the underworld powers, especially the hero or dead ancestor. Why the snake was so chosen we can only surmise. He obviously lived underground: his home was among the Chthonioi, the Earth-People. Also, says the Scholiast to Aristophanes (Plut. 533), he was a type of new birth because he throws off his old skin and renews himself. And if that in itself is not enough to show his supernatural power, what normal earthly being could send his enemies to death by one little ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray

... productive modes, and generally in all its modes:—and here it was worthy of remark, that the word used by the apostle on this occasion, and which had been translated men-stealers, should have been rendered slave-traders. This was obvious from the Scholiast of Aristophanes, whom he quoted. It was clear therefore that the Slave-trade, if murder was forbidden, had been literally ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808) • Thomas Clarkson

... day made sly sport of the love of Pericles and Aspasia. These two were intellectual equals, comrades; and that all of Pericles' public speeches were rehearsed to her, as his enemies averred, is probably true. "Aspasia has no time for society; she is busy writing a speech for her lord," said Aristophanes. Socrates used to visit Aspasia, and he gave it out as his opinion that Aspasia wrote the sublime ode delivered by Pericles on the occasion of his eulogy on the Athenian dead. The popular mind could not possibly comprehend ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard

... am sentimental and reflective; not just now. The ludicrous has its place in the universe; it is not a human invention, but one of the Divine ideas, illustrated in the practical jokes of kittens and monkeys long before Aristophanes or Shakspeare. How curious it is that we always consider solemnity and the absence of all gay surprises and encounter of wits as essential to the idea of the future life of those whom we thus deprive of half their faculties and then call BLESSED! There are not a few who, even ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... smugness of appearance about the frog that provokes a smile in the irreverent. Still, the frog has received some consideration in his time. The great Homer himself did not disdain to sing the mighty battle of the frogs and mice; and Aristophanes gave the frogs a most important chorus in one of his comedies; moreover, calling the whole comedy "The Frogs," although he had his choice of title-names among many very notable characters—AEschylus, Euripides, Bacchus, Pluto, Proserpine, and other leaders of society. Still, in ...
— The Strand Magazine: Volume VII, Issue 37. January, 1894. - An Illustrated Monthly • Edited by George Newnes

... true in a certain sense that some of the greatest writers the world has seen—Aristophanes, Rabelais and Sterne—have written nonsense; but unless we are mistaken, it is in a widely different sense. The nonsense of these men was satiric—that is to say, symbolic; it was a kind of exuberant capering ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton

... affectionate. Lave us laugh an' sing th' octopus out iv existence. Betther blue but smilin' lips anny time thin a full coal scuttle an' a sour heart. As Hogan says, a happy peasanthry is th' hope iv th' state. So lave us warble ti-lire-a-lay—' Jus' thin Euclid Aristophanes Madden on th' quarther deck iv th' throlley car give a twisht to his brake an' th' chief ixicutive iv th' nation wint up in th' air with th' song on his lips. He wint up forty, some say, fifty feet. Sicrety Cortilloo says three hundherd an' fifty. ...
— Observations by Mr. Dooley • Finley Peter Dunne

... make such justifiable use of their idleness. There are plenty of young men parading around in long trailing robes, their hair oiled and curled most effeminately, their fingers glittering with jewels,—"ring-loaded, curly-locked coxcombs," Aristophanes, the comic poet, has called them,—and they are here only for silly display. Also there are many of their elders who have no philosophy or wit to justify their continuous talking; nevertheless, all considered, it must be admitted that the Athenian makes a use of their dearly ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis

... priest of Poseidon, and the priest of the Sun walked from the Acropolis under the shade of a huge white umbrella which was borne over their heads by the Eteobutads. See Harpocration and Suidas, s.v. [Greek: Skiron]; Scholiast on Aristophanes, Eccles. 18. ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer

... after their wedding tours, to see Patience just for a day before they were taken to their new homes. Nevertheless, let us hope that the change of air and of scene may tend to future diligence, and that the magnus opus may yet be achieved. We have heard of editions of Aristophanes, of Polybius, of the Iliad, of Ovid, and what not, which have ever been forthcoming under the hands of notable scholars, who have grown grey amidst the renewed promises which have been given. And some of these works have come forth, belying ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope

... birds, named here and in the previous description of the garden, are introduced, as far as I can judge, nearly at random, and with no precision of imagination like that of Aristophanes; but with a sweet childish delight in crowding as many birds as possible into the smallest space. The popinjay is always prominent; and I want some of you to help me (for I have not time at present for the chase) in hunting the parrot down on his first appearance ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin

... agreed so far, will you not agree with me further that Life has not measured the success of its attempts at godhead by the beauty or bodily perfection of the result, since in both these respects the birds, as our friend Aristophanes long ago pointed out, are so extraordinarily superior, with their power of flight and their lovely plumage, and, may I add, the touching poetry of their loves and nestings, that it is inconceivable that Life, having once produced them, should, if love and beauty ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw

... Cf. Thuc. ii. 16 for Attica. Such are the numerous small farmers who appear in the plays of Aristophanes. ...
— On The Structure of Greek Tribal Society: An Essay • Hugh E. Seebohm

... grotesque forms—beings who were ever present to the fancy of the Greeks, as a convenient step by which they could approach more nearly to the presence of the Divinity.' But even out of that seemingly bare chaos, Athenian genius was learning how to construct, under Eupolis, Cratinus and Aristophanes, that elder school of comedy, which remains not only unsurpassed, but unapproachable, save by Rabelais alone, as the ideal cloudland of masquerading wisdom, in which the whole universe goes mad—but with a ...
— Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 • Charles Kingsley

... well have said that it was like the sound of a rum distillery running a night shift on half time. At any rate this is what I said about Homer, and when I spoke of Pindar,—the dainty grace of his strophes,—and Aristophanes, the delicious sallies of his wit, sally after sally, each sally explained in a note calling it a sally—I managed to suffuse my face with an animation which ...
— Behind the Beyond - and Other Contributions to Human Knowledge • Stephen Leacock



Words linked to "Aristophanes" :   dramatist, playwright



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