Aristophanic Comedy.

University of California Press, Berkeley / Los Angeles, 1972. 1st ed. XV,253p. ills.(B&W photographs). Paperback. Spine with two light reading traces. 'Dover reconstructs Athenian public opinion to determine what attitudes and characters Aristophanes was able to exploit for comic effect. He supports his interpretations with evidence from drama, rhetoric, philosophy, history, art, and the law of Athens. (...) The book is so crammed with information (...) on all aspects of Greek life that one can almost imagine himself sitting in the theatre in Athens laughing at the same jokes as the rest of the audience. In the last chapter, Dover provides a classic justification for reading a dead author like Aristophanes. 'The moral utility of reading the works of a dead author - and whether he died this morning or two thousand years ago makes no essential difference - lies, I suggest, not in the possibility of doing what he appears to recommend and refraining from what he appears to forbid, but in two other directions. First by adding his experience to ours we can look through his eyes at elements of human life which are common to his culture and ours, and can thus criticize and adjust our assumptions and attitudes, as we can also by understanding and absorbing the experience of contemporary individuals whose lives and environments differ from our own. Secondly, in so far as art is an aspect of our nature, on a part with exercise, religion, sex, and work, enjoying literature is better than not enjoying it, and the effort to relive the intellectual and aesthetic proces through which an ancient dramatist gave a play its final form has some claim to be a self-rewarding activity.' (p.228). 'Aristophanic Comedy' has great value for anyone seeking enlightenment and entertainment, but it offers more to the classicist. It is a model for the theacher who hope to pass on his love and knowledge of Greek culture and his own certainty of its rewards.' (LOUIS SETTLER SPATZ in The Classical Journal, 1975,4, p.71).