"Aristophanes" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... soothe a bitterness of soul best measured by the 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 ...
— Elizabeth's Campaign • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... literature, the same sublimation of humour that we find in their other qualities. Unfortunately the greater number of their comedies are lost. Of Menander we have but a few tiny fragments, as it were, of a delectable vase; but in Aristophanes there is a delicious levity, an incomparable prodigality of laughter-moving absurdities, which has possibly never been equalled. Side by side with that is the tender and charming irony of Plato, who is even more humorous, if less witty, than Aristophanes. But the Greeks ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... 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
... are judging of him and of Pahlin in the way you reproach me with judging Mezzofanti; I thank you, and I wish for the dedication Gabricote; and I also wish for your return to Madrid, so that in going to Toledo you would get a copy of Aristophanes with the order that will be given to you by my ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... More important, the censorship might insist that all who write shall sign their names to their articles. Why should journalists alone be relieved of responsibility to their country? Is it possible that the Government is afraid of the press? There is no need for fear. 'Beware of Aristophanes', says Landor, 'he can cast your name as a byword to a thousand cities of Asia for a thousand years. But all that the press can do by its disfavour is to keep your name obscure in a hundred cities ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh
... Assyria and Egypt, and by the remarkable discoveries of Dr. Schliemann at Hissarlik and in Greece. But the appreciation of him as a poet has never failed, though it is disappointing to find that a man so great as Aristophanes should describe him simply as the bard of battles, and sad to think that in many of the Christian centuries his works should have slumbered without notice in hidden repositories. His place among the greatest poets of the world, whom no one supposes to be more than three or four in number, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... humor in De Quincey to have endowed a dozen Aristophaneses. There was something, too, in its order, by which it resembled the gigantesque features of the old Greek master. I will illustrate my meaning by a single instance from each. In Aristophanes's "Clouds," Strepsiades is being initiated into the Socratic Phrontisterium, and in the course of the ceremony Socrates directs his pupil's attention to the moon for certain mysterious purposes. But the moon only reminds ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... causes:—The universality of his genius was, perhaps, a disadvantage to his single works; the variety of his resources, sometimes diverting him from applying them to the most effectual purposes. He might be said to combine the powers of AEschylus and Aristophanes, of Dante and Rabelais, in his own mind. If he had been only half what he was, he would perhaps have appeared greater. The natural ease and indifference of his temper made him sometimes less scrupulous than he might have been. ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... 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, ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... "schoolmate," as the "American Entomologist" puts it. He was the author of "A Historical Account of the University of Cambridge and its Colleges," London, 2nd edition, 1837; also of a translation of part of "Aristophanes," 1837: from the dedication of this book it seems that he was at St. Paul's School, London. He settled in America in 1838, but only began serious Entomology about 1858. He never returned to England. In a letter to Mr. Darwin, November 7th, 1864, he gives a curious account of the solitary laborious ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... from all the other Comedies of Aristophanes which have come down to us in subject and general conception. It is just an extravaganza pure and simple—a graceful, whimsical theme chosen expressly for the sake of the opportunities it afforded of bright, amusing dialogue, pleasing lyrical interludes, and charming displays of brilliant stage effects ...
— The Birds • Aristophanes
... 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 ...
— Pictures of Sweden • Hans Christian Andersen
... the temples of the same Deities; whose servant he professed himself to 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 ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume II. (of VI.) • Jacob Bryant
... the Universities, and have been illustrated 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 ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... for I did not carry Theodorus 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 ...
— Utopia • Thomas More
... realized why the terms male and female are so distinguished, my imagination was occupied with the possible postures in which the act of copulation may be accomplished by a man and woman; from Horace, Lucretius, Martial, Aristophanes, and, above all, from Ovid's Ars Amatoria I obtained much, but not always very clear, information while still a schoolboy. This was supplemented later by photographic pictures from Pompeiian brothels and photographs from life, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... Amongst 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, ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. II. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... 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
... particular—to discover a literature, and the finest in the world, which habitually philosophised life: a literature which, whether in a chorus of Sophocles or a talk reported by Plato, or in a ribald page of Aristophanes or in a knotty chapter of Thucydides, was in one guise or another for ever asking Why? 'What is man doing here, and why is he doing it?' 'What is his purpose? his destiny?' 'How stands he towards those unseen powers—call them the gods, or ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... modes:—and here it was worthy of remark, that the word used by the apostle on this occasion, and which had been translated men-stealers, should have been rendered slave-traders. This was obvious from the Scholiast of Aristophanes, whom he quoted. It was clear therefore that the Slave-trade, if murder was forbidden, ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808) • Thomas Clarkson
... but a 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, ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... 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 ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... writers of antiquity. 'Boys,' he remarked, 'do not like poetry.' Perhaps his own poetical taste was a little dubious; at any rate, it is certain that he considered the Greek Tragedians greatly overrated, and that he ranked Propertius as 'an indifferent poet'. As for Aristophanes, owing to his strong moral disapprobation, he could not bring himself to read him until he was forty, when, it is true, he was much struck by the 'Clouds'. But Juvenal, the Doctor could never bring himself to ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... American millionaires look funny, and in making them want to get away and live in Europe. But "Life" is not enough; it merely hitches us along from day to day and keeps our courage up. We want in America a literature, we want the thing done thoroughly and forever and once for all. We want an Aristophanes, a master who shall go gloriously laughing through our world, through our chimneys and blind machines, pot-bellied fortunes, empty successes, all these tiny, queer little men of wind and bladder, until we have a nation filled with a divine laughter, ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... the cream—all these danced in a giddy reel, while Plato solemnly discoursed on the laws of Topsyturvy Land. Then followed grim-visaged Calvin and "violet-crowned, sweet-smiling Sappho" who danced a Schottische. Aristophanes and Moliere joined for a measure, both talking at once, Moliere in Greek and Aristophanes in German. I thought this odd, because it occurred to me that German was a dead language before Aristophanes was born. Bright-eyed Shelley brought in a fluttering lark which burst into ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... Milkmaid and her Pot of Milk, which gave rise to our popular saying, "Don't count your 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 verse, his example being followed by Babrius, amongst ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... Leroux, who had quoted passages from the philosophers in the Chamber. Jokes were made about the phalansterian tail. The "Market of Ideas" came in for a meed of applause, and its authors were compared to Aristophanes. Frederick patronised the work as ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... 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.,) ...
— Scarabs • Isaac Myer
... mere 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, ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... following an emotional influence which, strangely enough, it may seem to some, finds more support from the biological and medical side than the Anglo-Saxon movement has always been able to win. From the time of Aristophanes downwards, whenever they have demonstrated before the masculine citadels, women have always been roughly bidden to go home. And now, here in Germany, where of all countries that advice has been most freely and persistently given, women are adopting new tactics: they have gone home. ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... falsify his character by making a speech. Then he proceeds to divide his accusers into two classes; first, there is the nameless accuser—public opinion. All the world from their earliest years had heard that he was a corrupter of youth, and had seen him caricatured in the Clouds of Aristophanes. Secondly, there are the professed accusers, who are but the mouth-piece of the others. The accusations of both might be summed up in a formula. The first say, 'Socrates is an evil-doer and a curious person, searching into things under ...
— Apology - Also known as "The Death of Socrates" • Plato
... 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
... shall do 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 work of ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... and a good reproductive system that should serve the race, at the same time that she was continuously spending her force in intellectual labor. Nature asked for a periodical remission, and did not get it. And so Miss G—— died, not because she had mastered the wasps of Aristophanes and the Mecanique Celeste, not because she had made the acquaintance of Kant and Koelliker, and ventured to explore the anatomy of flowers and the secrets of chemistry, but because, while pursuing these studies, while doing ...
— Sex in Education - or, A Fair Chance for Girls • Edward H. Clarke
... were modeled upon the vetus comaedia of Aristophanes, which was satirical in purpose, and they belonged to an entirely different school from Shakspere's. They were classical and not romantic, and were pure comedies, admitting {121} no admixture of tragic motives. There is hardly one lovely or beautiful character in ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... a genuine patriotism. The Attic comedy was produced at the festivals of Dionysus, which were marked by great license, and to this, rather than to the individual taste of the poet, must be ascribed the undoubted coarseness of many of the jests. Aristophanes seems, indeed, to have been regarded by his contemporaries as a man of noble character. He died shortly after the production of his "Plutus," in 388 ...
— The Frogs • Aristophanes
... Aristophanes, in his comedy of the Clouds, brings in Socrates and Chaerephon, measuring the leap of a flea from the ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... literature can afford to be without; classics, ancient and modern, on which the world has pronounced its verdict. These works, in whatever shape we may be able to possess them, are the necessary foundations of even the smallest collections. Homer, Dante and Milton Shakespeare and Sophocles, Aristophanes and Moliere, Thucydides, Tacitus, and Gibbon, Swift and Scott,—these every lover of letters will desire to possess in the original languages or in translations. The list of such classics is short indeed, and when we go beyond it, the tastes of men begin to differ very widely. An assortment ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang
... 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
... poems were published in 1668; he translated-likewise the second Epod of Horace, several pieces out of Claudian, and likewise a dramatic piece from Aristophanes, which he calls Hey for Honesty, Down with Knavery, a pleasant comedy printed in 4to. London 1651. A gentleman of St. John's College, writes thus in honour of ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume I. • Theophilus Cibber
... course, make such justifiable use of their idleness. There are plenty of young men parading around in long trailing robes, their hair oiled and curled most effeminately, their fingers glittering with jewels,—"ring-loaded, curly-locked coxcombs," Aristophanes, the comic poet, has called them,—and they are here only for silly display. Also there are many of their elders who have no philosophy or wit to justify their continuous talking; nevertheless, all considered, it must ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... that the repetition of the words 'sub aqua,' in the line 'Quamvis sint sub aqua, sub aqua, maledicere tentant,' not inelegantly [non ineleganter] expresses the croaking noise of the frogs. A man's fancy must, indeed, be exuberant to find any such resemblance; more so, indeed, than that of Aristophanes, who makes his frogs say, by way of chorus, 'brekekekekex koaex koaex.' Possibly, however, that might have been the Attic ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... slaughter, the loudest expression of the little civilization of men. The light of Athene over the head of Achilles illuminates the birth of Greek Tragedy. But Comedy rolled in shouting under the divine protection of the Son of the Wine-jar, as Dionysus is made to proclaim himself by Aristophanes. Our second Charles was the patron, of like benignity, of our Comedy of Manners, which began similarly as a combative performance, under a licence to deride and outrage the Puritan, and was here and there Bacchanalian beyond ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Euripides, and Sophocles, Elizabeth Barrett had read every line. Plato she loved and read exhaustively; of Aristotle at this time she had read his Ethics, Poetics, and his work on Rhetoric, and of Aristophanes a few, only, of his plays. But Miss Barrett was also a great novel-reader, keeping her "pillows stuffed with novels," as she playfully declared. Her room, in the upper part of the house, revealed the haunt of ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... different quarter—"I had to refer the other day to Aristophanes, and came by chance on a curious Speaking-pot story in the Vespae, which ...
— Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam • Omar Khayyam
... 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 ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... of fancy. Among the Kaffirs {54b} we find the same 'swallow-myth.' The Igongqongqo swallows all and sundry; a woman cuts the swallower with a knife, and 'people came out, and cattle, and dogs.' In Australia, a god is swallowed. As in the myth preserved by Aristophanes in the 'Birds,' the Australians believe that birds were the original gods, and the eagle, especially, is a great creative power. The Moon was a mischievous being, who walked about the world, doing what evil he could. One day he swallowed the eagle-god. ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... 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 humor, ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... Jan. 30.-Admiral Byng's trial. Voltaire's letter on his behalf. Death of Fontenelle. Brumoy's "Aristophanes." Lady Essex and ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... his satire in one of his most humorous plays, "The Devil is an Ass." In it he turns the last-mentioned peculiarity to good account; for when Fitzdottrell, in the fifth act, feigns madness, and quotes Aristophanes, and speaks in Spanish and French, the judicious Sir Paul Eithersides comes to the conclusion that "it is the devil by ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding
... of power, great writers ancient and modern have delighted. These for the most part are meant to do service for the moment, and then to pass away{101}. The inventors of them had themselves no intention of fastening them permanently on the language. Thus among the Greeks Aristophanes coined {Greek: mellonikiao:}, to loiter like Nicias, with allusion to the delays with which this prudent commander sought to put off the disastrous Sicilian expedition, with not a few other familiar to every scholar. The humour of them sometimes consists ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... 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 with ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... 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 Callimachus' Hymn to ...
— The Argonautica • Apollonius Rhodius
... Cause of the violence of faction in that age. Influence of Athenian genius on the human intellect and on private happiness. The gifts of Athens to man. Character of the great dramas of Athens. Change in the temper of the Athenians in the time of Aristophanes. ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... 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. ...
— Agamemnon • Aeschylus
... 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
... a spade. The phrase really comes from Aristophanes, and is quoted by Plutarch, as Philip's description of the rudeness of the Macedonians. Kudos. Greek word for "pride", used as ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... two half-brothers don't make one whole brother." And people chuckled as the little joke was copied from one paper to another all over the English-speaking world, and applauded the excellent quaintness of Punch's Aristophanes. So, when a fictitious dinner of the Punch Staff at Lord Rothschild's was reported in the press, Mr. Burnand briefly dismissed the matter with the remark ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... I've a pretty taste for paradox; I quote in elegiacs all the crimes of HELIOGABALUS, In conics I can floor peculiarities parabolous. I tell undoubted RAPHAELS from GERARD DOWS and ZOFFANIES, I know the croaking chorus from the "Frogs" of ARISTOPHANES; Then I can hum a fugue, of which I've heard the music's din afore, And whistle all the airs from that confounded nonsense "Pinafore." Then I can write a washing-bill in Babylonic cuneiform, And tell you every ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... never supposed himself an actor; took a part, when he took any, merely for convenience, as one takes a hand at whist; and found his true service and pleasure in the more congenial business of the manager. Augier, Racine, Shakespeare, Aristophanes in Hookham Frere's translation, Sophocles and AEschylus in Lewis Campbell's, such were some of the authors whom he introduced to his public. In putting these upon the stage, he found a thousand exercises for his ingenuity and taste, a thousand ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... he came forth to warme Our eares, or like a Mercury 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 ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... 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 much amused, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... 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 unaware of the secret. The Silphium, or laserpitium ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... in the last chapter, once more rescued the stage of Greece from barbarism. In the death of Aristophanes was involved the death of "the middle comedy," which rapidly declined in the hands of his insufficient successors. The poets and wits that came after him, wanted either the talents, the malignity, or the courage to follow his example, to imitate ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 5, May 1810 • Various
... complete failures. 'Greece 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
... a hunt-dance or a 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 their skins and feathers, mimicking ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison
... In dramatic composition, Aristophanes is perpetually hooking in parodies of Euripides, whom of all poets he hated, as well as of AEschylus, Sophocles, and other tragic bards. Since, at length, that Grecian wit has found a translator saturated with his genius, and ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... Miss Lucy in Town appeared at Drury Lane, Millar published it in book form. In the following June, T. Waller of the Temple-Cloisters issued the first of a contemplated series of translations from Aristophanes by Henry Fielding, Esq., and the Rev. William Young who sat for Parson Adams. The play chosen was Plutus, the God of Riches, and a notice upon the original cover stated that, according to the reception it met with from the public, it would be followed by the others. It must be presumed that "the ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... to 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 with ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes
... clown! If one must be a philosopher, let him be Aristophanes. And no one at the table thinks I am jingled. I am in fine fettle, that is all. I tire of the labour of thinking, and, when the table is finished, start practical jokes and set all playing at games, which we ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... and said the same thing of your Pope. Madame de Sevigne was a clever woman, but she thought Racine would never be very famous. Milton saw nothing in the first efforts of Dryden that made him consider Dryden better than a rhymester. Aristophanes was a good judge of poetry, yet how ill he judged of Euripides! But all this is commonplace, and yet you bring arguments that a commonplace ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... concupiscence. Again there is a union, which is the effect of love. This is real union, which the lover seeks with the object of his love. Moreover this union is in keeping with the demands of love: for as the Philosopher relates (Polit. ii, 1), "Aristophanes stated that lovers would wish to be united both into one," but since "this would result in either one or both being destroyed," they seek a suitable and becoming union—to live together, speak together, and be united together in ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... father taking the trouble to translate to me from the French the historical explanations in Mingault's notes. In Greek I read the Iliad and Odyssey through; one or two plays of Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes, though by these I profited little; all Thucydides; the Hellenics of Xenophon; a great part of Demosthenes, Aeschines, and Lysias; Theocritus; Anacreon; part of the Anthology; a little of Dionysius; several books of Polybius; and lastly Aristotle's ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... condescension as toys, or with distrust and scorn as vicious inferiors. In the Classic world, they were always treated as far inferior to the other sex, and held up in literature in the most odious light. Euripides was surnamed the woman-hater, from the scorn with which he depicts the sex. The comedies of Aristophanes are mercilessly sarcastic, in their portrayals of women: his "Ecclesia" might be taken for a freshly painted ironical picture of the "Woman's-rights Movement" of to-day. And what a frightful picture of the Roman women Juvenal paints in his ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... 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 ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson
... called Shakespeare "le sauvage ivre," or to quote him exactly: "On croirait que cet ouvrage (Hamlet) est le fruit de l'imagination d'un sauvage ivre," who said that Dante would never be read, and that the comedies of Aristophanes were unworthy of presentation in a country tavern! One is tempted to believe that the father was a man of robuster judgment in such matters than the son, whose own rather mediocre literary equipment, made him the easy prey of that ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... Greek Chorus, as an ornament and source of fresh delight. Like the songs of the Chorus, they bid us pause a moment over the wider laws and actions of human fate and human life, and we turn from your persons to yourself, and again from yourself to your persons, as from the odes of Sophocles or Aristophanes to the action of their characters on the stage. Nor, to my taste, does the mere music and melancholy dignity of your style in these passages of meditation fall far below the highest efforts of poetry. I remember that scene where Clive, at Barnes Newcome's Lecture on the Poetry of the Affections, ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... have said of Homer, I would say in a degree, but somewhat lower, of those great Ancients who are the most accessible to us in English—AEschylus, Aristophanes, Virgil, and Horace. What I have said of Shakespeare I would say of Calderon, of Moliere, of Corneille, of Racine, of Voltaire, of Alfieri, of Goethe, of those dramatists, in many forms, and with genius the most diverse, who have so steadily ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... custom of the Athenians, who never 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
... universal 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! What form of government is then the best? All ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book VI • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... domestic life those ladies may be placed, they would have their full rights, if not something more; and as for Parliamentary rights, I tremble for the unprotected males should such viragos ever compass the franchise; or, worse still, realize the ambition of the Ecclesiazusae of Aristophanes, and sit on the benches of St. Stephen's clad in the nether garments of the hirsute sex. There was nothing of that kind on Tuesday night. In manner and appearance our present Praxagora was thoroughly feminine, and, by her very quietude of manner, impressed me with a consciousness of power, ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... the 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 arranged ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... 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, ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... 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
... 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 that she would cease to ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... said Mr. Pembroke, who did not want a brother-in-law out of Aristophanes. Nor had he got one, for Mr. Dawes would not have bothered over the garland or noticed the spring, and would have complained that the friend ran too ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... on their religious and spiritual natures which they could neither satisfy nor overlook. They did not know whether he was too wildly imaginative or too realistic, too romantic or too prosaic, too childishly simple or too philosophical—Aristophanes says he was all these things at once. They only knew that he made them angry and that they could ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... 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 ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 11, 1919 • Various
... related the advent of the king of blood and the pope of gold. We know how they ended. Jacques de Molay, from his funeral pyre, adjured them both to appear before God within the year. Ae to geron sithullia, says Aristophanes. "Dying hoary heads ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere
... chik, churr, churr" of the 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 at once ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... 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 greatest of ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... glasses. Ptolemy reckoned a much less number for the whole heavens The missionaries found many more stars marked in the Chinese charts of the heavens than formerly existed in those which were in use in Europe. Suidas, at the word {Greek} (glass), indicates, in explaining a passage in Aristophanes, that burning mirrors were occasionally made of glass. Now how can we suppose burning mirrors to have been made of glass without supposing the magnifying powers of glass to have been known? The Greeks, as Plutarch affirms, employed metallic mirrors, ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... rhegium, in the time of cambyses, stesimbrotus the thracian, antimachus the colophonian, herodotus of halicarnassus, dionysius the olynthian, ephorus of cumae, philochorus the athenian, metaclides and chamaeleon the peripatetics, and zenodotus, aristophanes, callimachus, erates, eratosthenes, aristarchus, and apollodorus, the grammarians, all wrote concerning the poetry, the birth, and the age of homer." See Coleridge's Introd., p. 57. "Yet, for aught ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... need 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
... subjects. I have a set of notes on the [Greek: Ploutos] and [Greek: Nephelai] of Aristophanes, finished on Mar. 15th, 1823, and I began my daily writing of Latin as usual on Feb. 8th. In mathematics I worked very hard at Lunar and Planetary Theories. I have two MS. books of Lunar Theory to the 5th order of small quantities, which however answered no ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy
... that scholars are any longer allowed even to read Aristophanes—far less translate him. And cannot they see—these perverts of a purity that insults the sunshine—that humour, decent or indecent, is precisely the thing that puts sex properly in its place? Cannot they see that by substituting morbid sentiment ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... apartment, and, like the sentry, "walked his dreary round" at unseasonable hours of the night, at which time could be plainly heard the wretched chuckle, and crackings of knuckles (Mr. Sloe's way of expressing intense delight), with which he welcomed some miserable joke of Aristophanes, painfully elaborated by the help of Liddell-and-Scott; or the disgustingly sonorous way in which he declaimed his Greek choruses. This was bad enough at night; but in the day-time there was a still greater nuisance. ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... Juvenal, Terence and Plautus are approved as poets. Suitable books to study during the vacations are the works of Lorenzo della Valle, Aulus Gellius, and Poliziano. In Greek the writings—most of them quite new to the age—of Isocrates, Lucian, Philostratus, Aristophanes, Theocritus, Euripides, Sophocles, Pindar, Hesiod, Demosthenes, Thucydides, Aristotle, and Plutarch are recommended. Such a list bears few resemblances to the academic library ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... are Bacchus and Ampelos, superbly pagan, while a sleeping Cupid is most lovely. Among the various fine heads is one of Cicero, of an Unknown—No. 377—and of Homer in bronze (called by the photographers Aristophanes). But each thing in turn is almost the best. The trouble is that the Uffizi is so vast, and the Renaissance seems to be so eminently the only proper study of mankind when one is here, that to attune oneself to the enjoyment of antique sculpture needs a special effort ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... term, thought that Euripides did. He will require more than usual attention. I am sure he can easily receive it. I would not, if I were you boys, be too chary this term of extra work. Some of you are almost painfully conscientious in your objection to overdo a particular study. Aristophanes is an author with whom liberties may safely be taken in this respect. The test of a good classical scholar, remember, is not the work he is obliged to do, but what he is not obliged to do—his extra work; I advise you not to be afraid to try it. The Sanatorium has been unusually free of cases ...
— The Cock-House at Fellsgarth • Talbot Baines Reed
... no sooner did the comic writers appear, ridiculing those very tragic poets, than they became still greater favourites with the people. Horace has transmitted to us the names of three of these comic poets, cotemporaries—Cratinus, Eupolis and Aristophanes. If there were any before them, their names are buried in oblivion. Taking the structure of the tragedies of AEschylus for their model, these commenced the first great era of improvement in the comic drama. Of the comedies of Cratinus, ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 4, April 1810 • Various
... In the Aves of Aristophanes, the Bird Chorus declare that they are older than the Gods, and greater benefactors of men. This idea recurs in almost all savage mythologies, and I have made the savage ...
— Rhymes a la Mode • Andrew Lang
... twenty years have well-nigh engrossed criticism, as the main, if not the only, butt of review, magazine, pamphlet, poem, and paragraph; this is indeed matter of wonder. Of yet greater is it, that the contest should still continue as undecided as [19] that between Bacchus and the frogs in Aristophanes; when the former descended to the realms of the departed to bring back the spirit of ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... the 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 ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... praise, as it 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 of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 402, Supplementary Number (1829) • Various
... 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 ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... phenomena of disease were not evidence of divine displeasure, but that they were due to natural causes. When therefore this new belief became established, temple-sleep degenerated into a superstitious rite. As early as the fifth century B. C., the celebrated poet, Aristophanes, in his comedy, "Plutus," severely criticized this ceremony, as practised in his time. And, although the more enlightened among the Greeks came to regard it with disfavor, the custom was never entirely abandoned ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... were what English public opinion generally assumes them to be during their lifetime: that is, a licentiously irregular group to be kept in order in a rough and ready way by a magistrate who will stand no nonsense from them. But I cannot admit that the class represented by Eschylus, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Euripides, Shakespear, Goethe, Ibsen, and Tolstoy, not to mention our own contemporary playwrights, is as much in place in Mr Redford's office as a pickpocket is in Bow Street. Further, it is not ...
— Mrs. Warren's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... volume, that they continue to give milk as long as they suckle their infants, and that their milk does not fail until they cease to nourish them."[53] So well, indeed, was this fact known to the ancients, that Aristophanes uses the expression, [Greek: pôosthên mikran], penem exiguum, as an attribute of a youth who has preserved his innocence and [Greek: kôlên megalên], penem magnum, as the sign of ...
— Aphrodisiacs and Anti-aphrodisiacs: Three Essays on the Powers of Reproduction • John Davenport
... botany lessons, and a Scottish cook, deprived of bay-leaf, has been known to make an experiment in the use of what she called "Roderick Randoms," members of the vegetable kingdom which proved to be rhododendron. As for pennyroyal, most people have only heard of it through Mr. Bonn's crib to Aristophanes. ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... government, on the ground of their indecency. 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. Rabelais ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... ingredients were required by the clever but licentious rabble of Athens, to whom these representations were more particularly addressed, besides the better commodities of rich poetry and wit; and hence the deformities which have been so much complained of in the writings of Aristophanes. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 482, March 26, 1831 • Various
... borrowers from other 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 ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... true in 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 ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... to the poet's bibliographical tastes has been detected in the scene of The Frogs of Aristophanes, where AEschylus and Euripides are weighing verses against each other in the presence ...
— The Care of Books • John Willis Clark
... dead man being carried out to burial who meets Dionysus in Hades, in Aristophanes' Frogs, and expresses the wish that he may be struck alive again if he does what is requested of him. If ghosts are often represented as "all loath to leave the body that they love," they are generally quite as loath to return to it, when once they have left it, though whether it ...
— Greek and Roman Ghost Stories • Lacy Collison-Morley
... 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 ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... theatre, took place a series of representations, by students, of marvellous pomp and elaboration. The school and college plays were of various characters. Sometimes they were from Terence, Plautus, or Aristophanes; sometimes modifications of the ancient mysteries, meant to enforce the Evangelical theology; sometimes comedies full of the contemporary life. There are several men that have earned mention in the history of German literature by writing plays for students. ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... and well-spread in the hold, by which it both carries a large cargo and sails well. And so it was called, because the first of that kind was seen at Samos, having been built by order of Polycrates the tyrant. These brands upon the Samians' foreheads, they say, are the allusion in the passage of Aristophanes, where ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... 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 satisfactory sense ...
— The Angel and the Author - and Others • Jerome K. Jerome
... thirty thousand persons. It contained statues of all the great tragic and comic poets, the most conspicuous of which were naturally those of AEschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, among the former, and those of Aristophanes and Menander among the latter. On the southwest side of the Acropolis is the site of the Odeum, or musical theatre of Herodes Atticus, named by him the theatre of Regilla, in honor of his wife. ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... Pindaric; not inferior in many instances to the Attic remains, and characterised, at the same time, by a singular combination of vigour and grace. Another saloon is devoted to AEschylus, and the library to Sophocles. The gay, wild muse of Aristophanes laughs and sings in his Majesty's dressing-room; while the king is lulled to slumber by the Sicilian melodies and ...
— Sketches • Benjamin Disraeli
... comedy was almost extinct; the new had not yet arisen. Dramatic and lyric poetry, like every other branch of Greek literature, was falling under the power of rhetoric. There was no 'second or third' to Aeschylus and Sophocles in the generation which followed them. Aristophanes, in one of his later comedies (Frogs), speaks of 'thousands of tragedy-making prattlers,' whose attempts at poetry he compares to the chirping of swallows; 'their garrulity went far beyond Euripides,'—'they ...
— The Republic • Plato
... 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 me ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome
... to praise the decorations of the ceilings and the beauty of the curtains suspended from between the columns." This occurs, according to Mr. Perkins, the American translator of Dr. Falke's German book "Kunst im Hause," in the "Wasps of Aristophanes," ...
— Illustrated History of Furniture - From the Earliest to the Present Time • Frederick Litchfield
... disordred loue. And many other of the myserable ruyne and fal of Kynges and princes for vice: as Tragedies. And some other wrote Comedyes with great libertye of speche: which Comedies we cal Interludes. Amonge whome Aristophanes Eupolis and Cratinus mooste laudable Poetes passed al other. For whan they sawe the youth of Athenes and of al the remanent of Grece inclyned to al ylles they toke occasion to note suche myslyuinge. ...
— The Ship of Fools, Volume 1 • Sebastian Brandt
... out to his countrymen models of taste, and banished totally the bad taste of his Predecessors. For his Lutrin, replete with excellent poetry, wit, humour, and satire, he certainly was not obliged to the ancients. Excepting Horace, how little idea had either Greeks or Romans of wit and humour! Aristophanes and Lucian, compared with moderns, were, the one a blackguard, and the other a buffoon. In my eyes, the Lutrin, the Dispensary, and the Rape of the Lock, are standards of grace and elegance, not to be paralleled by antiquity; and eternal reproaches to Voltaire, ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... sent me by an unknown hand, a passage out of Plato,[3] with some hints how to apply it. That author puts a fable into the mouth of Aristophanes, with an account of the original of love. That, mankind was at first created with four arms and legs, and all other parts double to what they are now; till Jupiter, as a punishment for his sins, cleft him in two ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... 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 ...
— Lectures on Architecture and Painting - Delivered at Edinburgh in November 1853 • John Ruskin
... don't wonder, or blame you. I am a very queer bird for the perch I have lit on; I know that as well as anybody. The only wonder is that you ever took the trouble to try to lime me. Now have another glass of toddy. Why! it is near twelve. I must have one pipe and turn in. No Aristophanes to-night." ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... soothsayers, who professed to utter oracles from the gods, particularly when war was threatening. This was so (e. g.) at the time of the Peloponnesian War (Thucyd. ii. 8, v. 26), and the soothsayer is delightfully caricatured by Aristophanes in the Birds ...
— The Public Orations of Demosthenes, volume 2 • Demosthenes
... complete. Phormio. | Goethe's Egmont. Virgil's AEneid, the 1st Six Books.| Goethe's Faust. Virgil's Eclogues and Georgics. | Goethe's Iphigenia In Tauris. AEschylus' Prometheus Bound, and | Goethe's Hermann and Dorothea. Seven Against Thebes. | Lessing's Minna von Barnhelm. Aristophanes' Clouds. | Lessing's Nathan the Wise. Aristophanes' Birds, and Frogs. | Schiller's Maid of Orleans. | Schiller's Maria Stuart. | Schiller's William Tell. | Feuillet's Romance of ...
— Iphigenia in Tauris • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... the grandiose and monstrous defence of personal force defying the social. But will it not remain also, by the side of Hegel's philosophy, as an eloquent codicil to those testaments of individual sovereignty signed by Aristophanes, Montaigne, and Voltaire? He believed himself a spiritualist, and, sublime sawbones, he studied only in the medical amphitheatre. He entered a drawing-room only through the kitchen and the dressing-room. He was ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... sailing about, but by 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 ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... could 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, in its mixture of stiffness ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... abstract are represented in a picture: (9) the fiction of the earth-born men (Republic; compare Laws), in which by the adaptation of an old tradition Plato makes a new beginning for his society: (10) the myth of Aristophanes respecting the division of the sexes, Sym.: (11) the parable of the noble captain, the pilot, and the mutinous sailors (Republic), in which is represented the relation of the better part of the world, and of the philosopher, to the mob of politicians: (12) the ...
— Gorgias • Plato
... Lausanne. My habitation was embellished in my absence, and the last 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 ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... active in public affairs, were represented on the stage in satirical pieces, so that they were at once identified. The spirit of the "old comedy" was patriotic, although it might be unjust, as in the case of Socrates, who was a target for the wit of Aristophanes. The "middle comedy" was nothing really distinct from the "new comedy." The "new comedy," in which Menander (342-290 B.C.) was an eminent author, ceased to present actual persons, and dealt with imaginary characters alone. Among the Greeks in Lower Italy ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher |
