Aristophanes: Ecclesiazusae

Ecclesiazusae, probably produced in 391 BC, is at once a typically Aristophanic fantasy of gender inversion, obscenity and farce, the earliest surviving work in the western Utopian tradition, and the source of a blueprint for a communist society on which Plato may well have drawn in his Republic. This edition attempts to set the play, more closely than has usually been done, against the background of Athens at the time of its production, when she has just spurned what proved to be her last opportunity to escape from a war she had not the resources to fight, and to define the details of staging as precisely as the text will allow.