This volume is the first edition with commentary since 1907 of Aristophanes last surviving play, in which, as so often before, an audacious and imaginative hero finds a miraculous remedy for the all-too-real ills of the contemporary worldin this case the concentration of wealth in the hands of those who dont deserve it at the expense of those who do. To achieve this he needs the aid of no less than three gods, and the play contains the fullest single surviving account of a visit to a sanctuary of the healing god Asclepius. This volume will include the ADDENDA to all previous plays, but the INDEXES proved far more extensive than anticipated and will now be published as a separate volume 12 to complete the Aristophanes series.
Alan H. Sommerstein is Professor of Greek and Director of the Centre for Ancient Drama and its Reception, University of Nottingham, editor of the Aristophanes volumes in the Aris & Phillips Classical Texts series (1980-98) and of Aeschylus Eumenides (Cambridge, 1989); author of Aeschylean Tragedy (Bari, 1996) and of Guide to Greek Drama (London, forthcoming); co-editor of Tragedy, Comedy and the Polis (Bari, 1993), Shards from Kolonos: Studies in Sophoclean Fragments (Bari, forthcoming) and several other multi-author volumes.
