The Eleven Comedies

Aristophanes' The Wasps opens with a household in comic siege, where Philocleon's addiction to jury service has become a civic disease and his son Bdelycleon fights to cure it. Servants keep watch through the night as the old man schemes, disguises himself, and even gnaws through a net to reach the law courts, while the Chorus of old jurors arrives like a swarm of angry wasps, loyal to the tribunals that feed them. Their lantern-lit grumbling, threats, and mud-soaked march turn Athens' legal obsession into a scene of riotous farce, exposing the absurdity, corruption, and violence hidden inside public habit. The play then widens into a brilliant comic contest over art and culture as Dionysus judges a duel between Euripides and Aeschylus. Euripides defends realism, clever argument, and everyday speech; Aeschylus champions noble examples, grandeur, and the moral force of older tragedy. Their battle becomes a satire of criticism itself, with attacks on prologues, diction, and audience taste, while the play probes the uneasy link between literature, civic virtue, and the changing values of Athens. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.