Four Greek Comedies

'The Birds', 'The Frogs', 'The Clouds', and 'The Peace'

By: Aristophanes, C. A. Wheelwright - translator

Narrated by: Flo Gibson

These four plays, translated into blank verse by C. A. Wheelwright, present to us the wide range of this ancient playwright's fertile imagination. From war and peace to politics and society to the relationships between mena nd women, no topic is off-limits.

Public Domain (P)2009 Audio Book Contractors, Inc.

Past Its Sell-By Date?

Aristophanes is considered one of the greatest comic dramatists of the ancient world. Perhaps, but this translation seems unperformably complex. It doesn’t help that most modern audiences lack the background to see much of the humor, which in our era has come to depend too much on explanatory footnotes. Maybe it would work on a stage where at least gestures would help. (A clumsy on-line video performance of “The Birds” leads me to doubt this.)

In this Audible reading, each speech is preceded, as in a script, by the name of its speaker, relevant or not, but all the characters have the same voice.

It is hard to imagine how these plays could be made delightful audio art, although perhaps it remains worth trying. But it is also hard to imagine that more than a very few listeners will easily enjoy Aristophanes’ work presented as an inscrutable creaking museum piece.

irritating narrative and badly translated

I enjoy anything to do with ancient greece and find it extremely irritating when acient greece and rome mythology/names are mixed up. Aristophanes was born in 450 bc in Athens. of the four plays in this book the first was written is the peace in 422 bc and the latest written was the frogs in 405 bc. furthermore each of these plays deals with the political atmosphere of the time. so the gods would then be greek gods and not Roman gods. because of the wrong translation for the gods it takes away from the overall points of the play. it would have also been nice if multiple people had been reading the plays instead of one person.

Fabulous!

If one grows wary of lackluster and dim contemporary publications, they should feast on the timeless scrutiny of these delicate treasures.