Aristophanes: Wealth (Aris & Phillips Classical Texts) - Softcover

This volume marks the last of Ss editions of Aristophanes plays in the A&P series and makes a fitting end to what is surely to be regarded as a major scholarly achievement. The text is clearly laid out and well-proof read ... and the translation is certainly up to Ss usual standard: it is lively, thoughtful and illuminates the text well. His extensive introduction and commentary benefit from his high level of scholarship, and take on a broad range of historical, literary and textual issues, whilst still remaining accessible to a fairly broad audience. In his introduction especially, he frames well a selection of the debates surrounding a play, which was all but neglected in the 20th C.' With this welcome volume on Wealth, a neglected play, Sommerstein has now (almost) brought his series of editions of Aristophanes extant comedies to a successful conclusion. ... Sommerstein has packed a lot into a small package and made this comedy accessible to both seasoned scholar and Greekless novice.'

This volume is the first edition with commentary since 1907 of Aristophanes' last surviving play, in which, as so often before, an audacious and imaginative hero finds a miraculous remedy for the all-too-real ills of the contemporary world in this case the concentration of wealth in the hands of those who don't deserve it at the expense of those who do. To achieve this he needs the aid of no less than three gods, and the play contains the fullest single surviving account of a visit to a sanctuary of the healing god Asclepius.This volume includes the Addenda to all previous plays, but the Indexes proved far more extensive than anticipated and has now been published as a separate volume which completes the Aristophanes series.