"Aristophanes" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... classic poetry Homer Greek lyrical poetry Pindar Dramatic poetry Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides Greek comedy: Aristophanes Roman poetry Naevius, Plautus, Terence Roman epic poetry: Virgil Lyrical poetry: Horace, Catullus Didactic poetry: Lucretius Elegiac poetry: Ovid, Tibullus Satire: Horace, Martial, Juvenal Perfection of Greek prose writers History: Herodotus ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... Squire's most unusual taciturnity. No railing at the Government or the war, not a fling even at the 'd——d pedant, Chicksands!' or 'The Bubbly-jocks,' as he liked to call the members of the County War Committee. Elizabeth put a text of Aristophanes—the Pax—into his hands, and drew her table near to him, waiting his pleasure. There was a lamp behind him which fell on her broad, white brow, her waiting eyes and hand, and all the friendly intelligence of her face. The ...
— Elizabeth's Campaign • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of the frogs that have helped to point the gibes of Aristophanes, the morals of AEsop, and which have always been, more or less, regarded as the low ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... 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 ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... with me 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 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 ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... fact. That it ended towards evening is, I think, proved by the line from the "Vespae" which I have already quoted, and to which my attention was called by Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton's account of the battle. I think that the succeeding lines in Aristophanes, also already quoted, justify the description which I have given of the rear-ranks of the Persians keeping up a flight of arrows over the heads of their comrades against ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... now, since we are, with that exception, 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 ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... suffrage. Universal suffrage is Democracy. Is Democracy better than the aristocratic commonwealth? Look at the Greeks, who knew both forms; are they agreed which is the best? Plato, Thucydides, Xenophon, Aristophanes—the Dreamer, the Historian, the Philosophic Man of Action, the penetrating Wit—have no ideals in Democracy. Algernon Sidney, the martyr of liberty, allows no government to the multitude. Brutus died for a republic, but a republic of Patricians! ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book VI • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... different quarter—"I had to refer the other day to Aristophanes, and came by chance on a curious Speaking-pot story in the Vespae, ...
— Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam • Omar Khayyam
... later that the first transparent product was manufactured. Under Pharaoh it was one of the products extensively made and exported to Phonecia and other Mediterranean ports. Five hundred years before Christ, Aristophanes mentions glass or crystal vessels, but as its value at that time was next to gold it could not have been a ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Exploring the Island • Roger Thompson Finlay
... poems and translations (renderings, 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 of the ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... 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 of these naughtinesses. A French woman novelist had ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... it while I'm here. I'll not allow you to make yourself a miserable ass all for nothing. Come, write. If it's not written in ten minutes, I'll write it;" and so saying, he took up a play of Aristophanes wherewith to amuse himself, by way of light reading, after the heavy ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... 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 the stage ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... in the quiet havens of conversation. Some of these may be personal —piquantly personal, perhaps—but the mighty public has had an appetite for gossipings about prominent men and measures ever since the time when the old Athenians crowded to hear the plays of Aristophanes. ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... fact of being chargeable with faults and imperfections is to condemn an author, who is to escape? The greatest writers of antiquity have, in this way, been obnoxious to criticism. Aristotle himself has been accused of ignorance; Aristophanes of impiety and buffoonery; Virgil of plagiarism, and a want of invention; Horace of obscurity; Cicero has been, said to want vigor and connexion, and Demosthenes to be deficient in nature, and in purity of language. Yet these have all survived the censures of the critic, and flourished on to a glorious ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... 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 the market-place and the home, and find an ultimate ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... f., ll. 40 ff.]—With this silent scene of Clytemnestra's, compare the long silence of Cassandra below, and the silence of Prometheus in that play until his torturers have left him. See the criticism of Aeschylus in Aristophanes, Frogs, ll. 911-920, pp. 68, 69 ...
— Agamemnon • Aeschylus
... the Arabian Nights for a model. The satiric romance, "Harry Richmond," often reminds of the leisured episode method of the eighteenth century; and while reading the unique "Evan Harrington" we think at times of Aristophanes. ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... the races of the Titans, whom Zeus, the son of Kronos, puts to sleep in fiery all-surrounding flame.' The names of those Athenians who had been eminent for military virtue, were also embroidered on it. This will explain the following allusion in the Knights of Aristophanes, where the chorus says—'We wish to praise our fathers, because they were an honour to this country and worthy of the peplus: in battles by land and in the ship-girt armament conquering on all occasions they exalted this city.' When the festival was celebrated, ...
— How to See the British Museum in Four Visits • W. Blanchard Jerrold
... necromancy is well known to have prevailed extensively among the Greeks and Romans. Aristophanes represents the coward, Pisander, going to a necromancer and asking to "see his own soul, which had long departed, leaving him a man with breath alone."45 In Latin literature no popular terror is more frequently alluded to or exemplified ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... dyscoursing heads Bibiena, Machiavel, and Aretine did (to let Bembo and Ariosto passe), with the great admiration and wonderment of the whole countrey; being indeede reputed matchable in all points, both for conceyt of witte, and eloquent decyphering of matters, either with Aristophanes and Menander in Greek, or with Plautus and Terence in Latin, or with any other in any other tong. But I will not stand greatly with you in your owne matters. If so be the Faery Queen be fairer in your eie than the ...
— A Biography of Edmund Spenser • John W. Hales
... York) a Greek text book—-"First 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 ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... translations from Italian comedy, and renderings of one Spanish model, 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 with a view to publication in print. The ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... Latin language received the versions of Aristotle and Plato; so obscure in sense, and in spirit so poor. But the Greeks who have escaped the contagion, are those whom we follow; and they alone are worthy of our imitation. In familiar discourse, they still speak the tongue of Aristophanes and Euripides, of the historians and philosophers of Athens; and the style of their writings is still more elaborate and correct. The persons who, by their birth and offices, are attached to the Byzantine court, are those who maintain, with ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... modern have delighted. These for the most part are meant to do service for the moment, and, this done, to pass into oblivion; the inventors of them themselves having no intention of fastening them permanently on the language. Thus Aristophanes coined [Greek: mellonikiao], to loiter like Nicias, with allusion to the delays by whose aid this prudent commander sought to put off the disastrous Sicilian expedition, with other words not a few, familiar to every scholar. The humour will sometimes consist ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... little Southern bird which haunts the gardens of Greece, sings its "tio, tio, tio, tio, tix" of Aristophanes' comedy on this wind-swept Northern isle; the rose-coloured starling, that rare and beautiful bird of a warmer clime, has been seen here in the spring; the eagle and the golden eagle hover above its crags; the sparrow-hawk and the great gyrfalcon prey upon the small birds and little rodents; even ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... palustris), or Great Reed Mace, a perennial reed common in Great Britain, affords by the tender white part of its stalks when peeled near the root, a crisp, cooling, pleasant article of food. This is eaten raw with avidity by the Cossacks. Aristophanes makes mention of the Mace in his comedy of frogs who were glad to have spent their day skipping about inter Cyperum et Phleum, among Galingale and Cat's-tail. Sacred pictures which represent our Saviour wearing the crown of thorns, place this reed in His hands as given ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... of followers have, in all ages, graced the banners of the Athenian bard! Sophocles, Aristophanes, Menander, and Euripides, in Greece; Terence and Plautus in Rome; Metastasio, Goldoni, and Alfieri in Italy; Corneille, Racine, Moliere, and Voltaire in France; Schiller,[N] in himself a host, in Germany—contribute ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... is, in fact, but comedy or satire finding its outlet in another form of expression. And this is so true that wherever we find brilliant or trenchant satire of life there we may be sure, too, that caricature is not far absent. Pauson's grotesques are the correlative of the Comedies of Aristophanes; and when the development of both is not correlative, not simultaneous, it is surely because one or other has been checked by political or social conditions, which have been inherently antagonistic ...
— The Eighteenth Century in English Caricature • Selwyn Brinton
... fifth-century Greece and that of Elizabethan England. Between these peaks lies a broad valley, the bottom of which is formed by the centuries from the fifth to the ninth after Christ. From its culmination in the tragedies of AEschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and in the comedies of Aristophanes, the classic drama declined through the brilliantly realistic comedies of Menander to the coldly rhetorical tragedies of the Roman Seneca. The decay of culture, the barbarian invasions, and the attacks of the Christian Church caused a yet greater decadence, a fall so complete ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... Of this poem Matthew Arnold says: '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 Shakspeare and Aristophanes.' ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... too much resembling that of Methodism; yet, 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 ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... those which he shewed to us, the works relating to Normandy constituted an important portion. His manuscript missals are numerous and valuable. I was also much pleased by the inspection of an old copy of Aristophanes, which had formerly belonged to Rabelais, and bore upon its title-page the mark of his ownership, in the hand-writing of the witty, though profligate, satirist himself. M. Pluquet's kindness allowed me to make the tracing of the signature, which ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. II. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... your 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
... comes well in the first rank. He was one of the most distinguished of the early Parisian Greek typographers, besides being a person of learning and eminence, and was issuing books up to the year 1544; his edition of Aristophanes, 1582, published by Gilles De Gourmont, is described as "asingularly curious impression," whilst ten years later he printed Guillaume Postel's "Linguarum XII. characteribus differentium Alphabetum," which is described by La Caille as the "first book ...
— Printers' Marks - A Chapter in the History of Typography • William Roberts
... Cratinus, Aristophanes, and all The elder comic poets, great and small, If e'er a worthy in those ancient times Deserved peculiar notice for his crimes, Adulterer, cut-throat, ne'er-do-well, or thief, Portrayed him without fear in strong relief. From these, as lineal heir, Lucilius springs, ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... 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; ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... orthodoxy, and the naive unconsciousness with which they measure and weigh the moral qualities of other nations by the yards of cotton or tons of manufactured iron which they consume for the benefit of Manchester and Sheffield, are certainly as comic as anything in Aristophanes. The madness of the philosopher who deemed himself personally answerable for the obliquity of the ecliptic has more than its match in the sense of responsibility shown by British journalists for the good conduct of the rest of mankind. All other kingdoms, potentates, and powers ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... 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, ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume II. (of VI.) • Jacob Bryant
... beauty-loving Greek an impossibility, although he was equally conscious of the demands of reason and of morality. Thus it happened that art, which, on the purely hedonistic hypothesis, had been treated as a beautiful courtezan, became in the hands of the moralist, a pedagogue. Aristophanes and Strabo, and above all Aristotle, dwell upon the didactic and moralistic possibility of poetry. For Plutarch, poetry seems to have been a sort of preparation for philosophy, a twilight ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... S., I've understood," said Raven mildly. "Don't I recall your telling me he was the greatest ever, at least since Aristophanes?" ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... Struldbrug, rather than a true ambrosia-fed immortal. There are true 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 man to follow, nor do I see why it should not be as correct to laugh with him as to pull a ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... rain-dance, and it is not likely that, if he had seen one, he would have allowed it to be art at all. But he must often have seen a class of performances very similar, to which unquestionably he would give the name of art. He must have seen plays like those of Aristophanes, with the chorus dressed up as Birds or Clouds or Frogs or Wasps, and he might undoubtedly have claimed such plays as evidence of the rightness of his definition. Here were men imitating birds and beasts, dressed in ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison
... honey-guide. Occasionally, near villages, we have a kind of mocking-bird, imitating the calls of domestic fowls. These African birds have not been wanting in song; they have only lacked poets to sing their praises, which ours have had from the time of Aristophanes downward. Ours have both a classic and a modern interest to enhance their fame. In hot, dry weather, or at midday when the sun is fierce, all are still: let, however, a good shower fall, and all burst forth ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... excite interest by adding to a character one or two of the peculiarities of a local celebrity (miser, prodigal, or beggar) known for the quality typified. If this was so, it was an interesting reversion to the methods of Aristophanes. But it is only a guess. What is certain is that in the Interludes we find the 'type' gradually assuming a greater complexity, a larger measure of those minor features which make the ordinary man interesting. Significantly enough, the last thing to be acquired was a name ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... 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 reading or ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... drunken driver, sailor, or carter will only be a risible object. Jests that would be insufferable in a man of education amuse us in the mouth of the people. Of this kind are many of the scenes of Aristophanes, who unhappily sometimes exceeds this limit, and becomes absolutely condemnable. This is, moreover, the source of the pleasure we take in parodies, when the feelings, the language, and the mode of action of the common people are fictitiously lent to the same personages whom ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... expressions of feeling; and since the lyric cannot dispense with the external world, classic song now shewed the tender subjective feeling for Nature which we see in Sappho, Pindar, and Simonides. Yet Euripides (and Aristophanes, whose painful mad laugh, as Doysen says, expresses the same distraction and despair as the deep melancholy of Euripides) only paved the way for that sentimental, idyllic feeling for Nature which dwelt on her quiet charms for their own sake, ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... and death make a dark background against which the brilliant colouring of Greek life glitters out with heightened magnificence, the comedy of men and manners occupies an important part of their literature, and Aristophanes and Menander are as intimately Greek as Sophocles. It is needless to speak of what we gain in our knowledge of Greece from the preserved comedies of Aristophanes; and if we follow the best ancient criticism, we must conclude that in Menander we have lost a treasury of Greek life that cannot ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... 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 their temperament, that while the dry light of the intellect ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... the top shelf the Bible and the works of Plautus and Diderot; on the second from the top the plays of Shakespeare in a blue edition; on the third from the bottom Don Quixote, in four volumes, covered with brown paper; a green Milton; the "Comedies of Aristophanes"; a leather book, partially burned, comparing the philosophy of Epicurus with the philosophy of Spinoza; and in a yellow binding Mark Twain's "Huckleberry Finn." On the second from the bottom was lighter literature: ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... medeni tropoi ton tes helladus 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 "Lays of Ancient Rome," with which he was ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... like the man at the piano, kept on doing his best. It all came to nothing: as poetry it never began to be more than null. Mr. Hardy wrote a few mournfully memorable lines on the seamy side of war. Mr. Owen Seaman (who may pass for our contemporary Aristophanes) was smart and witty at the expense of those whose philosophy goes a little deeper than surface-polish. One man alone—Mr. Henry Newbolt—struck a note which even his opponents had to respect. The rest exhibited plenty of the turbulence ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... a reputation of another kind. It is a source of flatulence; you eat it, as the saying is, and then you take a walk. It lends itself to the gross pleasantries loved of the populace; especially when they are formulated by the shameless genius of an Aristophanes or a Plautus. What merriment over a simple allusion to the sonorous bean, what guffaws from the throats of Athenian sailors or Roman porters! Did the two masters, in the unfettered gaiety of a language less reserved than our own, ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... it appears impossible to read the line without seeing that Pope had in his mind the latter idea, that of poor, little, shabby, statureless monosyllables, as opposed to big, bouncing, brave, sonorous polysyllables, such as Aristophanes called [Greek: hraemata hippokraemna]. After all, however, it would do me very little damage to concede that he intended the meaning which [Greek: ph]. appears to attribute to the epithet "low", ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 53. Saturday, November 2, 1850 • Various
... this comic degradation, as may be seen in its earliest and perhaps its greatest practitioner Aristophanes—no bad citizen or innovating misbeliever—leads naturally to elaborate and ingenious exercises in style, to a thorough familiarity with the capacities of language, metre, rhyme. And expertness in all these ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... thing to strike us—paradoxical as it may sound to say so—about the Athenian 'Old Comedy' is its modernness. Of its very nature, satiric drama comes later than Epic and Lyric poetry, Tragedy or History; Aristophanes follows Homer and Simonides, Sophocles and Thucydides. Of its essence, it is free from many of the conventions and restraining influences of earlier forms of literature, and enjoys much of the liberty of choice of subject and licence of method that marks present-day conditions ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... parties, and an irrepressible desire for novelties. In Cratinus, comedy first made herself felt as a great power, who espoused the side of Cimon against Pericles, with great bitterness and vehemence. Many were the comic writers of that age of wickedness and genius, but all yielded precedence to Aristophanes, whose plays only have reached us. Never were libels on persons of authority and influence uttered with such terrible license. He attacked the gods, the politicians, the philosophers, and the poets of Athens; even ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... same, Jan. 30.-Admiral Byng's trial. Voltaire's letter on his behalf. Death of Fontenelle. Brumoy's "Aristophanes." ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... against monarchy, and an unsympathising reasoner might in the same way argue that religion is intolerant, that conscience makes cowards, that piety rejoices in fraud. Recent experience has added little to the observations of those who witnessed the decline after Pericles, of Thucydides, Aristophanes, Plato, and of the writer whose brilliant tract against the Athenian Republic is printed among the works of Xenophon. The manifest, the avowed difficulty is that democracy, no less than monarchy or aristocracy, sacrifices everything to maintain itself, and strives, with an energy and a ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... London, was to start next week. He had no writer of political leading articles. Would I do a "leader"? But I was not in favour of Lord Lytton's Afghan policy. How could I do a Tory leader? Well, I did a neutral-tinted thing, with citations from Aristophanes! I found presently some other scribes ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... all things, genuine prophet and anticipator as he was of the Protestant Christian aera,—should have given in his Dialogue of the Banquet, a justification of our Shakspeare. 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 ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... measure of the Keleusma was generally given by a flute-player, the Trieraules. AEschylus, Persians 403. Laert. Diog. IV. 22. In the Frogs of Aristophanes the inhabitants of the marshes are made to sing the Keleusma, v. 205. The melody, to the measure of which the Greek boatmen ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... women as the modern breeder pairs off horses, with a sole view to the excellence of the off-spring. A wife was not a helpmate, but a bearer of athletes. Women boxed, wrestled, and raced; a circumstance referred to in the following passage of Aristophanes, as rendered by ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... recent editorial 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 with this particular administration were evanescent. The immortal is, of course, ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... not also be rendered. A German is almost incapacitated for PRESTO in his language; consequently also, as may be reasonably inferred, for many of the most delightful and daring NUANCES of free, free-spirited thought. And just as the buffoon and satyr are foreign to him in body and conscience, so Aristophanes and Petronius are untranslatable for him. Everything ponderous, viscous, and pompously clumsy, all long-winded and wearying species of style, are developed in profuse variety among Germans—pardon me for stating the fact that even Goethe's prose, ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... Classics. It is also a debatable question whether it should be the aim of classical teaching to give all classical students some knowledge of the classic civilization as a whole; whether, for example, Aristophanes and Plautus, however important these authors may be for a complete understanding of the ancient life and literature, are worth while for all classical students alike. It is far more important, however, to determine whether, in that which seems to many persons ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... 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
... 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 ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... Robespierre's enemies had command of his historic reputation at its source, and this is always a great advantage for faction, if not for truth. So Robespierre's voice and person may have been maligned, just as Aristophanes may have been a calumniator when he accused Cleon of having an intolerably loud voice and smelling of the tanyard. What is certain is that Robespierre was a master of effective oratory adapted for a violent popular audience, to impress, ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... 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 ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... that the Graces, seeking an imperishable temple, discovered the soul of Aristophanes. To the grocers and statesmen of Queen Victoria it seemed otherwise. Their taste was a good deal nicer than that of Plato, or of Shakespeare for that matter, or of Dante, Rabelais, Catullus, Voltaire,[10] Gibbon or Balzac, to say nothing of St. Chrysostom (who could not ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... was a charming country—Greece was the parent of any civilisation we boasted. She gave us those ideas of architecture with which we raised that glorious temple at Kensington, and that taste for sculpture which we exhibited near Apsley House. Aristophanes gave us our comic drama, and only the defaults of our language made it difficult to show why the member for Cork did not ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... democracy, it is a democracy still kept within moral bounds, and owning a 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 ...
— Specimens of Greek Tragedy - Aeschylus and Sophocles • Goldwin Smith
... was so great that to attack him and serve him with an indictment would have drawn upon them public odium, it was thought necessary to begin by discrediting him in the view of the public. This was attempted by the comedy of Aristophanes entitled "The Clouds," in which Socrates was represented as teaching the art of making that which ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... of comedy and broad farce. There is a touch of 'tart Aristophanes' in the representation here. This is the introductory performance of the school in which the student hopes for high words howsoever low the matter, emphasizing that hope with an allusion to the heights of learning, ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... d'Amsterdam, where, in the wearisome loneliness of my sick-room, I get no scent, except it be, perhaps, the perfume of warmed towels. Alas! God's satire weighs heavily on me. The great Author of the universe, the Aristophanes of Heaven, was bent on demonstrating, with crushing force, to me, the little, earthly, German Aristophanes, how my wittiest sarcasms are only pitiful attempts at jesting in comparison with His, and how miserably I am beneath him in ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... belief, it is recorded that he identified Zeus with the air. Indirectly, however, we are able to demonstrate, by the aid of an almost contemporary witness, that there must have been some foundation for the accusation of "atheism." For in The Clouds, where Aristophanes wants to represent Socrates as an atheist, he puts in his mouth scraps of the naturalism of Diogenes; that he would hardly have done, if Diogenes had not already ...
— Atheism in Pagan Antiquity • A. B. Drachmann
... it. Then there is a certain pot-bellied 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. ...
— The Strand Magazine: Volume VII, Issue 37. January, 1894. - An Illustrated Monthly • Edited by George Newnes
... need; keep 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
... 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 ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... 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 ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... bards, who had a clear and sagacious eye for the discovery of truth. But let us remember that when Thespis spoke from his car, the world had also wise men. Homer had sung his immortal songs, and yet a new form of genius appeared, to which a Sophocles and Aristophanes gave birth; the Sagas and mythology of the North were as an unknown treasure to the stage, until Oehlenschlaeger showed what mighty forms from thence might be made to glide ...
— Pictures of Sweden • Hans Christian Andersen
... planting and tilling the earth, spread the story of the dispute between Minerva and Neptune for the sovereignty of Athens, in which Minerva, by producing to the judges an olive tree, was declared to have won; whereas Themistocles did not only knead up, as Aristophanes says, the port and the city into one, but made the city absolutely the dependent and the adjunct of the port, and the land of the sea, which increased the power and confidence of the people against the nobility; ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... 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
... a series of causes and effects. Nothing happens without a cause, every cause is a part of a whole, and consequently the whole leaves its impression on the slightest accident. Rabelais, the greatest mind among moderns, resuming Pythagoras, Hippocrates, Aristophanes, and Dante, pronounced three centuries ago that "man is a microcosm"—a little world. Three hundred years later, the great seer Swedenborg declared that "the world was a man." The prophet and the precursor of incredulity meet thus in the ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... civilizations. That astronomy had humble beginnings in Greece as elsewhere is highly probable. The late Mr. Andrew Lang wrote in this connection: "The very oddest example of the survival of the notion that the stars are men and women is found in the Pax of Aristophanes. Trygaeus in that comedy has just made an expedition to heaven. A slave meets him, and asks him: 'Is not the story true, then, that we become stars when we die?' The answer is, 'Certainly'; and Trygaeus points out the star into which Ion of Chios ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... a Note, as I suppose that, however far-fetched Olympiodorus' suggestion, this was an Oath familiar to Socrates alone, and which he took up for some, perhaps whimsical, reason. It is not to be found (is it?) in Aristophanes, where I suppose all the common Oaths come in; but then again I wonder that, if it were Socrates' Oath, it did not find its way into the Clouds, or perhaps into the criminal Charge against Socrates, as being a sort of mystical or ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... Gazette," the 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 ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... treatises that would have given many a precious hint. It is a pity they are not extant. From Lucian or from Juvenal, with his bitter picture of a Roman levee, much may be learnt; from the staid pages of Xenophon and Aristophanes' dear farces. But best of all is that fine book of the Ars Amatoria that Ovid has set aside for the consideration of dyes, perfumes, and pomades. Written by an artist who knew the allurement of the toilet and understood its philosophy, it remains without rival as a treatise upon Artifice. ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... solemn or sublime, which here meets us in the case of a procession, had already taken an important place in poetry. It was naturally compelled to choose victims of another kind than those of Aristophanes, who introduced the great tragedians into his plays. But the same maturity of culture which at a certain period produced parody among the Greeks, did the same in Italy. By the close of the fourteenth century, the love-lorn wailings of Petrarch's sonnets and others ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... Aristophanes, in "The Clouds" (lines 561-66), makes an allusion to which has been supposed (but probably without adequate warrant, in Spanheim's opinion), to refer to an eclipse of the Moon. The eclipse, October 9, 425 B.C., has, moreover, been suggested as that ...
— The Story of Eclipses • George Chambers
... 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 round a discovered truth. There is all the difference in the world between ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... others. Upon many occasions; even in support of the most obvious and indisputable propositions, he introduces a long string of quotations from the Mosaic law, from the Gospels, from the fathers of the church, from the casuists, and not unfrequently, even in the very same paragraph, from Ovid, and Aristophanes." This strange mixture is subject of many witticisms of Voltaire. But let us hear what is urged in the defence of Grotius, by a gentleman, of whose praise the ablest ...
— The Life of Hugo Grotius • Charles Butler
... to declare that he had never introduced a woman in love into any of his plays—[Greek: ouk oid' oudeis haentin erosan popt' epoiaesa gunaika]. He certainly has not done so in any one of the seven plays which have survived of the ninety that he wrote, according to Suidas; and Aristophanes would not have put that expression in his mouth had it not been true of the others, too. To us it seems extraordinary that an author should boast of having kept out of his writings the element which constitutes the greatest ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... Foote, the Aristophanes of the day, was a frequent visitor; his broad face beaming with fun and waggery, and his satirical eye ever on the lookout for characters and incidents for his farces. He was struck with the odd habits and appearance of Johnson and Goldsmith, now so often ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... with notes by reverend, very reverend, and right reverend commentators. Every year the most distinguished young men in the kingdom are examined by bishops and professors of divinity in such works as the Lysistrata of Aristophanes and the Sixth Satire of Juvenal. There is certainly something a little ludicrous in the idea, of a conclave of venerable fathers of the church praising and rewarding a lad on account of his intimate acquaintance with writings compared ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... popular esteem by his victory over the Spartans, but being sent against Brasidas, the Spartan general, was defeated and fell in the battle, 422 B.C.; is regarded by Thucydides with disfavour, and by Aristophanes with contempt, but both these writers were of the aristocracy, and possibly prejudiced, though the object of their disfavour had many of the marks of the vulgar agitator, and stands for ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... 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 ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... We are 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. ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... on a comfortable lounge, and took up a new novel which he had partially read, while Gates spread the big Greek lexicon on the study-table, and opening his Aristophanes, began slowly and laboriously to translate ...
— Walter Sherwood's Probation • Horatio Alger
... is, without exception, 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 Foote's account ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 402, Supplementary Number (1829) • Various
... Pantomime, Vocal Music, or "such delicate Art of the past as adapts itself to the frame of an intimate stage, and more especially all such new art as in the strength of its sincerity allows simplicity." Nor has it been my luck to be present during the production of "Lysistrata," by Aristophanes, or "Bastien et Bastienne," by W. A. Mozart, or "Orpheus," by Monteverde, or "Maestro di Capella," by Pergolese, or "Timon of Athens," by Purcell. Nor have I been present when an eminent technician has rendered Florent Schmitt's "Palais Hante," or Arnold Schoenberg's "Pierrot Lunaire." All of ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... to have invented the probe and the bandaging of wounds. His priests, the AEsclepiades, however, practised incantations, and cured diseases by leading their patients to believe that the god himself delivered his prescriptions in dreams and visions; for this imposture they were roughly satirized by Aristophanes in his play of "Plutus." It is probable that the preparations, consisting of abstinence, tranquillity, and bathing, requisite for obtaining the divine intercourse, and, above all, the confidence reposed in the AEsclepiades, were often productive ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... eleven volumes of The Bekker's Plato, with Notes, bound in Russia leather, side by side with Jowett's Translations in cloth; by Sophocles and Dean Plumptre, the Odyssey and Butcher and Lang; by AEschylus and Robert Browning. The Vicar had carried the illusion of scholarship so far as to hide his Aristophanes behind a little curtain, as if it contained for him an iniquitous temptation. Of his own accord and with a deliberate intention to deceive, he had added the Early Fathers, Tillotsen's Sermons and Farrar's ...
— The Three Sisters • May Sinclair
... Avoirdupois, or English measure or Flemish—and, finally, the hullaboloo they make if the customer is not perfectly satisfied with the monstrous little he gets for his money,—I don't wonder, for my part, how one loses temper and patience, and sends Pride, Honor, and Apology, all to the devil. Aristophanes, in his "Comedy of Peace" insinuates a beautiful allegory by only suffering that goddess, though in fact she is his heroine, to appear as a mute. She takes care never to open her lips. The shrewd Greek knew very well ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... poet can work. When we look at its variety and flexibility of structure—from the lyrical tragedy of AEschylus to a "Proverbe" of De Musset; at its diversity of spirit—from the exuberance of a comedy of Aristophanes and the caprice of an Elizabethan mask to the serenity of "Comus" and Tasso, and the terror of "Agamemnon" and "Macbeth;" at its range of expression—from, the full-toned Greek and English Iambic to the plain but sparkling prose of Moliere, and from ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... ask myself, do I see much that I can easily admire in Homer, Thucydides, Herodotus, Demosthenes, Aristophanes, Theocritus, parts of Lucretius, Horace's satires and epistles, to say nothing of other ancient writers, and yet find myself at once repelled by even those works of AEschylus, Sophocles and Euripides which ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... are to Cleon in this play are noteworthy. The great Demagogue was now dead, having fallen in the same action as the rival Spartan general, the renowned Brasidas, before Amphipolis, and whatever Aristophanes says here of his old enemy is conceived in the spirit of 'de mortuis nil nisi bonum.' In one scene Hermes is descanting on the evils which had nearly ruined Athens and declares that 'The Tanner' was the ...
— Peace • Aristophanes
... Aristophanes extolled its juice as a restorer of masculine vigour, and the Indians at this day sauce their viands with it. Nor are some of our skilful cooks ignorant how to condite it, with the applause of those who are ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... 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
... fun of any sort. It was not my ideal. He told me things had been written in a language called Greek that I should enjoy reading, but I had not even read all Captain Marryat. There were tales by Sir Walter Scott and "Jack Harkaway's Schooldays!" I felt I could wait a while. There was a chap called Aristophanes who had written comedies, satirising the political institutions of a country that had disappeared two thousand years ago. I say, without shame, Drury Lane pantomime and Barnum's Circus called to ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome
... age of Charles II. to that of Aristophanes—'which called its own grossness polite.' How bitterly he decries the stale poems of the time as 'a heap of senseless ribaldry;' how truly he shows that licentiousness weakens as well as depraves the judgment. 'When Satyrs are brought to court,' he observes, 'no wonder the Graces would not ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... is as superior to the pure but cold Terence, and to the droll Aristophanes, as to ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... flourished about B.C. 435. He is remarkable as having been regarded by all antiquity as an Atheist. In his youth he had some reputation as a lyric poet; so that he is sometimes classed with Pindar, Simonides, and Bacchylides. Aristophanes, in the Clouds, alludes to him where he calls Socrates "the Melian;" not that he was so, but he means to hint that Socrates was an atheist as well as the Melian Diagoras. He lived at Athens for many years till B.C. 411, when he fled from a prosecution instituted against him ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... 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, ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... 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 before ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... how the elder Queen of Navarre rebuked the lover carelessly stepping over the grave of his dead mistress, and to an unquotable anecdote to parallel the details of which, in literature of high rank, one must go to Rabelais himself, to Martial, or to Aristophanes. But, whatever the subject, the faculty of lively communication remains unaltered, and the suggestion of its transference from fact (possibly a little coloured) to pure fiction becomes more and more ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... Complete Concordance to the Comedies and Fragments of Aristophanes. By Henry Dunbar, M.D. ...
— How to Form a Library, 2nd ed • H. B. Wheatley
... little people looking up for the 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 ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... head of which was 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
... animals and prehistoric remains. It is, therefore a strange fact that the fowl is not mentioned in the Old Testament, nor figured on the ancient Egyptian monuments. It is not referred to by Homer or Hesiod (about 900 B.C.); but is mentioned by Theognis and Aristophanes between 400 and 500 B.C. It is figured on some of the Babylonian cylinders, between the sixth and seventh centuries B.C., of which Mr. Layard sent me an impression; and on the Harpy Tomb in Lycia, about ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... couched in witty and brilliant dialogue 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 ...
— Epicoene - Or, The Silent Woman • Ben Jonson
... 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 ...
— The Argonautica • Apollonius Rhodius
... weighs 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 ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... change." A pile of Cassandras, Harlequins and Columbines, jolted along high above the passers-by, all possible grotesquenesses, from the Turk to the savage, Hercules supporting Marquises, fishwives who would have made Rabelais stop up his ears just as the Maenads made Aristophanes drop his eyes, tow wigs, pink tights, dandified hats, spectacles of a grimacer, three-cornered hats of Janot tormented with a butterfly, shouts directed at pedestrians, fists on hips, bold attitudes, bare shoulders, immodesty unchained; a chaos of shamelessness driven by a coachman crowned ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... lunch-time we were fully occupied in giving each other ideas and then explaining why they wouldn't work. After lunch the Padre retired to his study to work out, he said, a satire—after ARISTOPHANES—which would afford him an opportunity of introducing the Archbishop of CANTERBURY'S speech, and making some whimsical allusions to the legend of the strayed lamb come back to tell his lean Scotch brethren of the green meadows and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 11, 1919 • Various
... 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 ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... ascribing to his favorite Marcus Antoninus, (Caesares, p. 333.) The Stoics and Platonists hesitated between the analogy of bodies and the purity of spirits; yet the gravest philosophers inclined to the whimsical fancy of Aristophanes and Lucian, that an unbelieving age might starve the immortal gods. See Observations de ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... us rain!" while others poured water on it through a sieve. Here the pouring of water through a sieve seems plainly an imitation of a shower, and reminds us of the manner in which Strepsiades in Aristophanes imagined that rain was made by Zeus. Sometimes, in order to procure rain, the Toradjas make an appeal to the pity of the dead. Thus, in the village of Kalingooa, there is the grave of a famous chief, the ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... ARISTOPHANES, the great comic dramatist of Athens, lived in the 5th century B.C.; directed the shafts of his wit, which were very keen, against all of whatever rank who sought in any way to alter, and, as it was presumed, amend, the religious, philosophical, social, political, or ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... looked at his son and saw that he was blushing with shame. The poor man understood his mistake. What good to have dazzled M. Patin before the whole University by reciting, without hesitation, three verses of Aristophanes, only to become a drudge and a packer? Well! so Amedee would yawn over green boxes and guess at enigmas in the Illustration. ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... other ancient writers have mentioned the scarabaeus, mostly in connection with Egypt. Orpheus, Theophrastus, Aristophanes, Pliny, Plutarch, AElian, Clement of Alexandria, Porphyry, Horapollon, Diogenes Laertius, who cites as works in which it was mentioned, the Natural Philosophy by Manetho (circa 286-247 B.C.,) the History of the Philosophy ...
— Scarabs • Isaac Myer
... Athenians of this time was Aristophanes, a writer of comedies or funny plays. He was so witty that his comedies are still admired almost as much as when they were played in the Theater of Dionysus for the ...
— The Story of the Greeks • H. A. Guerber
... but we could, if stopped, have left Paris two days later by the Rouen line, although on the 18th the trains by that last line were fired at. I wrote home that I could not help thinking of one of the plays of Aristophanes, in which a peasant wings his way to heaven on the back of a gigantic dung-beetle in order to remonstrate with God upon the evils which He has inflicted upon man by war, and finds that God is out, and that His ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... in Lucian in the second century, A.D. The great knowledge of life which travel had 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 has no worse ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... made 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 ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... coming, and addressing Moliere said to him in an undertone, "You see before you, my dear monsieur, a man who considers himself disgraced if you measure the flesh and bones that Heaven has given him; study this type for me, Master Aristophanes, ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... oriental 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
... whosoever desired to exhibit 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
... which the lyrical part was specially reserved. It was personal—that is, it directly attacked known contemporaries, often by name and often by bringing them on the stage. The celebrated authors of this "ancient comedy" were Eupolis, Cratinos, of whom we have only fragments, and Aristophanes, whose work has come ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... west of the Mississippi. In all ages ridicule has been the chief weapon of conservatism. If you want to know what line human progress will take in the future read the funny papers of today and see what they are fighting. The satire of every century from Aristophanes to the latest vaudeville has been directed against those who are trying to make the world wiser or better, against the teacher and the preacher, the scientist and ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson
... containing the expression [Greek: archaios (palaios) nes], as they have been sufficiently discussed by others. So, too, I have omitted all mention of the [Greek: megaron ta pros esperan tetrammenon],[31] the [Greek: parastades],[32] the passages in Homer,[33] Aristophanes,[34] and some other writers, because these references and allusions, being more or less uncertain or indefinite, may be (and have been) explained, according to the wish of the interpreter, as evidence for or against the continued ...
— The American Journal of Archaeology, 1893-1 • Various
... receiving the winds in bags from AEolus, and of the Cyclops hammering lightning sharp at the ends, on an anvil.[29] Of course, you will here and there find feeble evidences of a higher sensibility, chiefly, I think, in Plato, AEschylus, Aristophanes, and Virgil. Homer, though in the epithets he applies to landscape always thoroughly graphic, uses the same epithet for rocks, seas, and trees, from one end of his poem to the other, evidently without the smallest interest in anything of the kind; and in the mass of heathen writers, the ...
— Lectures on Architecture and Painting - Delivered at Edinburgh in November 1853 • John Ruskin
... 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, ...
— Utopia • Thomas More
... the dead. Do want to speak to Cicero?—I invoke him. Do I want to chat in the Athenian market-place, and hear news two thousand years old?—I write down my charm on a slip of paper, and a grave magician calls me up Aristophanes. And we owe ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Commission to inquire into his case; and, this done, 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, ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... may not be unworthy of notice, since it happened with a man of great celebrity in his time. A number of friends dined with Garrick on a Christmas day. Foote was then in Ireland. It was said, at table, that the modern Aristophanes (so Foote was called) had been horsewhipped by a Dublin apothecary, for mimicking him on the stage. "I wonder," said Garrick, "that any man should show so much resentment to Foote; he has a patent for such liberties; ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... to receive primary instruction 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, ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... to lay much stress upon those laid down in this lecture. We doubt 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 to be called—was of too watchful a jealousy ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... date. Only rarely is there less than 300 years' interval between an author's death and the earliest manuscript now extant of his works; in a great many cases 1,000 years have elapsed, and in the extreme—Sophocles and Aristophanes—1,400. The question therefore arises, How far do our manuscripts represent what was originally written? and it is the work of scholars to compare together existing manuscripts, to estimate their relative value, and where they differ, to determine, ...
— Selections from Erasmus - Principally from his Epistles • Erasmus Roterodamus
... History[37], in the course of an interesting discussion on palliatae and their Greek originals, has a far saner point of view. He says of the authors of New Comedy, "They wrote not like Eupolis and Aristophanes for a great nation; but rather for a cultivated society which spent its time ... in guessing riddles and playing at charades.... Even in the dim Latin copy, through which we chiefly know it, the grace of the original is not wholly obliterated. persons ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • Wilton Wallace Blancke
... was, as all the poets of so remote a period were, extremely accomplished in all the arts of vocal and instrumental music. He civilised the rude inhabitants of Greece, and subjected them to order and law. He formed them into communities. He is said by Aristophanes [24] and Horace [25] to have reclaimed the savage man, from slaughter, and an indulgence in food that was loathsome and foul. And this has with sufficient probability been interpreted to mean, that he found the race of men ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... 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 in Europe. ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... never was 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 ...
— The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century - Two Lectures delivered at the London Institution February - 4th and 11th, 1884 • John Ruskin
... a moral law: it is irresistible when its target is a false moral law or convention of morals set up to protect anti-social practices. Among these we may reckon bribery of politicians, oppression of the poor, vulgar ostentation, the habit of adultery and the writing of bad verse. Aristophanes, Moliere, Byron, and Dickens—these attempted to correct the social vices of ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... sense of justice is outraged. Why should the short brother be banged and thumped without reason? The Greek dramatist would have explained to us that the shorter brother had committed a crime against the gods. Aristophanes would have made the longer brother the instrument of the Furies. The riddles he asked would have had bearing upon the shorter brother's sin. In this way the spectator would have enjoyed amusement combined with the ...
— The Angel and the Author - and Others • Jerome K. Jerome
... a finger to her lips. Yet the whispers from them that have reached us, while furtive perhaps, are clear. They furnished the poets with notes that are resonant still. They lifted the drama to heights that astound. Even in the fancy balls of Aristophanes, where men were ribald and the gods were mocked, suddenly, in the midst of the orgy, laughter ceased, obscenities were hushed. Afar a hymn resounded. It was the chorus of the Initiate going ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... condemned a criminal without first 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
... other. Dr. Boomer said afterwards that the penetration of Tomlinson was wonderful, and that it was excellent to see how Boyster tried in vain to draw him; and Boyster said afterwards that the way in which Tomlinson quietly refused to be led on by Boomer was delicious, and that it was a pity that Aristophanes was not there to do ...
— Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich • Stephen Leacock
... tragic poet, was also a great annotator of his books; the Bibliotheque National at Paris possesses a Euripides and Aristophanes from his library, the margins of which are covered with notes in Greek, ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 4, Saturday, November 24, 1849 • Various |
