This study explores the treatment of the scenic and diegetic space in Aristophanes’ Acharnians, Knights, and Wasps, and the comedies’ attitude towards a variety of domestic and civic spaces, taking into consideration the cultural context in which the plays were composed. I argue that by using visual creativity and the available staging resources, Aristophanes calls attention to the consequences of the Peloponnesian war on the Athenians’ civic and domestic life. Acharnians, Knights, and Wasps all literalize in an imaginative way the impact of the polis, along with its civic policies and its dysfunctional institutions – the assembly, the agora, the boule, the lawcourts –, on the oikos and the householder, and explore what happens to the oikos together with its implications for the polis when the oikos loses its place of prominence.

A detailed review of a recent commented edition of Wasps, offering detailed comparison with MacDowell’s commentary and Wilson’s OCT text, with remarks on textual criticism and interpretations of various verses of the play.

Argues for the comic use of the actor's stage phallus in the scene and reflects on the difficulties entailed in reconstructing the stage action of ancient comic — as opposed to tragic — texts.

On "demagoguery."--- The Knights seems to be the least fanciful among the Aristophanic conceits that have come down to us. The play takes a hard look at democracy, depicting the people as a cynical, fickle, and spoiled master. The people's only hope, of which they are unaware, is for someone endowed with the special natural gifts of intelligence and shamelessness to emerge from their own lowest ranks (a sausage-seller) and to save them from their own excesses. To be sure, the presentation of the people as a unified persona, the character Demos, is a kind of fiction, as is the non-presence of women and children; and this points to the simplification of treating the people as a single, educable character (among other things) required for the beautification and rejuvenation of the people by the sausage-seller (1321; cf. Plato's Second Letter, 314c4). And the character of the sausage-seller himself, if not impossible, is at least a very unlikely type: someone who does exactly what's needed for political success, nothing more, nothing less; the real-life successor of Kleon would be the far less effective and gifted Hyperbolos (1300-15).

The paper proposes a new interpretation of the parodic reference to Euripides’ Hippolytus 345 present in the opening lines of Aristophanes’ Knights. It argues that the comic poet singles out exactly that line with the purpose of reminding the ‘correction’ which Euripides was compelled to make as the first version of his tragedy had ‘scandalized’ the audience, that same audience which then applauded the new version without realizing – to Aristophanes’ eyes – the ‘trick’ of Euripides’ subtle change.