Aristophanes and Menander: Three Comedies: Peace, Money, the God, and Samia

Description

Three Comedies features the work of three dramatic geniuses of the glorious, no-holds-barred tradition of ancient Athenian comedy. Here Aristophanes, the eight-hundred-pound gorilla of Old and Middle Comedy meets Menander, elephant in the room of New Comedy, in a match made possible by Douglass Parker--if not Athenian exactly, or even ancient, possibly the maddest chameleon ever to absorb the true colors of an ancient choral song, transpose a lost pun, or channel a venerable, giant, dung-eating cockroach for the benefit of those who couldn't be there the first time. Timothy J. Moore offers concise and informative introductions and notes to Parker's brilliant translation of Aristophanes' fantastical Peace and Money, the God and Menander's lively, domestic Samia--and includes, as a bonus, Parker's James Constantine Lecture at the University of Virginia, "A Desolation Called Peace: Trials of an Aristophanic Translator."

Douglass Parker (1927-2011) was Professor of Classics, University of Texas, Austin, where he taught for more than forty years. Both a Guggenheim Fellow and a finalist for the National Book Award for Translation for his The Congresswomen (Aristophanes' Ecclesiazusae, University of Michigan Press), he was described in one of his own syllabi as "rarely [thinking] of himself as an academic, but rather as an itinerant trombonist who took a wrong turn about 1946." His and Deena Berg's Plautus and Terence: Five Comedies is also published by Hackett.Timothy J. Moore is John and Penelope Biggs Distinguished Professor of Classics, Washington University in St. Louis.