The Eleven Comedies, Volume 1

Aristophanes was ancient Athens' most dangerous man with a joke. In these eleven plays, the great comic playwright takes aim at everything from warmongering generals to philosophy's pretensions, from democratic excess to the sacred cows of Athenian culture. The plays crackle with obscenity, fantasy, and razor-sharp political wit. In Lysistrata, women withhold sex until men end the Peloponnesian War. In The Clouds, Socrates gets dragged through the mud as a pedant who teaches people how to cheat debts. In The Frogs, Dionysus descends to the underworld to adjudicate a rivalry between tragic playwrights. These works earned Aristophanes lawsuits, political enmity, and a place as the single most brilliant wit the ancient world produced. That he still feels contemporary is no accident: comedy, at its best, is always an act of courage.