The wasps; The poet and the women; The frogs - Aristophanes

Aristophanes (c. 445 – c. 385 B.C.) was the last and greatest of the Old Attic Comedians.

Eleven of his plays survive and this collection contains The Wasps, one of his earliest, The Poet and the Women (Thesmophoriazusae), a gem of parody and low comedy, and The Frogs, a comic masterpiece written under the shadow of defeat. A century later the Old Comedy was already thought crude and old-fashioned, yet today much of the humour and fantasy seems oddly contemporary. At the same time Aristophanes has a way of letting the reader right into the spirit of Athens during the long, tragic war against Sparta.