The Birds of Aristophanes, ed. by W.C. GreenLongmans&Company, 1875 - 136 pages |
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Page 110 - My soul hath a desire and longing to enter into the courts of the Lord : my heart and my flesh rejoice in the living God. 3 Yea, the sparrow hath found her an house, and the swallow a nest where she may lay her young : even thy altars, O Lord of hosts, my King and my God.
Page 97 - He whistled shrill, And he was answered from the hill ; Wild as the scream of the curlew, From crag to crag the signal flew. Instant, through copse and heath, arose Bonnets and spears and bended bows : On right, on left, above, below, Sprung up at once the lurking foe ; From shingles...
Page 122 - That eagle's fate and mine are one, Which, on the shaft that made him die, Espied a feather of his own, Wherewith he wont to soar so high. Had Echo, with so sweet a grace, Narcissus' loud complaints return'd, Not for reflection of his face, But of his voice, the boy had burn'd.
Page 116 - ... lead to considerations very remote from the imitation of actual life, and manners and character, which, as constituting the most singular excellence of the author, it has been the object of the translator to illustrate. Of the Parabasis before us, the merits are well known, and perhaps no passage in Aristophanes has been oftener quoted with admiration. To bring the most sublime subjects within the verge of Comedy, and to treat of them with humour and fancy, without falling into vulgarity or offending...
Page viii - Silvern began it by his ingenious essay nearly half a century since. In his view THE BIRDS is a kind of allegory to dissuade the Athenians from the Sicilian expedition by exposing its folly. The birds are the Athenians; Cloudcuckoo-land their visionary empire ; the planners of it are certain politicians and orators ; Peisthetaerus is Alcibiades with a dash of Gorgias; Euelpides a credulous dupe; Epops, the crested hoopoe, is Lamachus, prominent at the beginning of the Sicilian expedition ; the gods...
Page ix - ... Alcibiades with a dash of Gorgias . . . ; the gods are the Lacedaemonians, to be surrounded in the Peloponnese and starved out."6 This theory was influential in its time,7 but by the end of the century, WC Green, whom I have been quoting, could dismiss it without much argument. Green comments simply that "the Bird-city founded in the play with complete success, a city to which is given all that Aristophanes . . . thought good, and from which is excluded all that he thought bad . . . this city...