Aristophanes' last two surviving plays, Assemblywomen and Wealth, have long been regarded as something of an enigma. The changes in structure – the diminution in the role of the chorus, the disappearance of the parabasis, etc. –, as well as the shift of interest away from the immediacies of current politics towards broader social themes, can reasonably be interpreted as an early stage of the process that ultimately transformed Old Comedy into New, even if it is unlikely ever to be (...) finally agreed whether Aristophanes was leading or following this trend. The decline in freshness, in verbal agility, in sparkle of wit, in theatrical inventiveness, which is perceptible in the earlier play and very marked in the later, may be put down to advancing years and diminishing inspiration. Such an explanation squares with the evidence of a marked decline in Aristophanes' productivity towards the end of his life. Whereas in the first seven years of his career he seems to have produced, or had produced for him, not less than ten plays, and in the years 420–405 approximately another eighteen, the twenty years or so that followed Frogs yielded a further eleven at the very most unless some titles have been completely lost; and since it is not likely that after the outstanding success of Frogs, and the public recognition that followed it, Aristophanes would have experienced any difficulty in securing a chorus, the explanation can only be that he was writing less. But the truly puzzling feature of the two late plays we possess is the apparent sea-change in the author's social orientation. In his fifth-century plays, from Acharnians toFrogs, as has been shown by de Ste Croix, Aristophanes reveals himself as one who instinctively speaks the language and thinks the thoughts of the well-to-do, even if at the same time he can laugh with the common man at ostentatious and useless wealth in the shape of Pyrilampes' peacocks, Leogoras' pheasants or the sultan-like garments of an Athenian imperial official – as one who was happy for the Demos to be sovereign so long as it was willing to be guided by the advice of its' betters', the καλоί тε κáγоθоί of Knights 738 or Frogs 727–9, and to leave them in the quiet enjoyment of their property. At first sight in Assemblywomen and Wealth this seems to have changed almost diametrically. (shrink)

I do not think it is possible to show beyond reasonable doubt that the two slaves who open the play either must have been, or cannot have been, visually identifiable by portrait-masks or otherwise as Demosthenes and Nikias. I wish however to point out a piece of evidence that appears to have gone unnoticed.

An ambiguity in this passage apperas to have gone unnoticed. The ambiguity in line 27 is well known; and when Xanthias at once continues ‘But you tell me about yours’, many a listener might well not immediately realize that the noun to be supplied was from 25 rather than from 27, and might therefore momentarily suppose that Xanthias was saying ‘Tell me about your penis’; a supposition that would be temporarily confirmed when Sosias replied ‘It's a big one’. The reaction (...) of such a listener would be the same as that of Kalonike at Lys. 23. She has been told that the women have been summoned to deliberate . Now she asks and on receiving the answer at once jumps to the conclusion that Lysistrata is using in its phallic sense and asks. (shrink)

Malcolm Davies, CQ 37 , 65–75, has argued strongly for the view, almost universally discarded since Fraenkel's Agamemnon appeared, that Aeschylus envisaged Klytaimestra as killing her husband with an axe. He succeeds in establishing a strong probability that, among the various pre-Aeschylean versions of the story of Agamemnon's death, those which had him killed in his bath with the help of an entangling robe always made Klytaimestra use an axe, not a sword, to strike the fatal blows; and Sophocles and (...) Euripides when they specify the weapon invariably specify it as an axe. All that this proves, however, is that if Aeschylus did make Klytaimestra kill Agamemnon in his bath with a sword, he was innovating. We have still to determine whether he did in fact so innovate. It is fair to treat the pre- and post-Aeschylean evidence as establishing a presumption in favour of the axe, but a presumption only: if there is unambiguous evidence in the text of the Oresteia that the Aeschylean Klytaimestra used a sword, it must be taken as outweighing any amount of external evidence which can show only that other Klytaimestras, imagined by other poets and artists, did not use one. (shrink)

Cobet, in his second discussion of γορεύω and its compounds, maintained that these verbs in Attic formed all tenses except present and imperfect from ρ, επον, ερηκα, ερηµα, ρρήθην, save that forms with -αγορευ- were optionally used to distinguish certain alternative meanings. Thus πηγόρευσα etc. could be used in the sense ‘forbid’, but not in that of ‘weary’ or ‘give up’; προηγορευµένα could be used in the sense ‘proclaimed’, but not in that of ‘foretold’ ‘or’ ‘said previously’; προσαγορεσαι etc. could (...) be used in the sense ‘call, name’ but not in that of ‘greet’. These distinctions, he believed, did not break down until about the time of Alexander. Hence his rejection of the aorist καταγορεύσ offered by the MS. tradition in Peace 107. But καταγορεύειν too is a verb with two clearly distinct ranges of meaning: ‘tell, declare’ and ‘denounce, accuse’. (shrink)