Lysistrata Materials

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donhamiltontx
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Lysistrata Materials

Post by donhamiltontx »

Expecting to read Lysistrata in the very near future, I have on hand Jeffrey Henderson's Clarendon Paperbacks edition originally published 1987. Is there anything more recent than Henderson, as discussed in this Textkit thread viewtopic.php?f=2&t=63766&p=174516&hili ... ta#p174516 ?

Hylander
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Re: Lysistrata Materials

Post by Hylander »

There’s a 2014 edition by Alan Sommerstein in the Aris & Phillips Classical Texts series. Text, facing page translation and notes with English lemmata.
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mwh
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Re: Lysistrata Materials

Post by mwh »

I’d say Henderson is all you need, but if you want more I recommend Sommerstein’s Aris and Phillips edition, more recent than Henderson and in some ways improving on it, and with facing translation that you can cover over until you’ve made what you can of the Greek. Wilson’s OCT (vol.2), being an OCT, doesn’t offer commentary or translation, and his text is probably no better.
Crossed with Hylander.

donhamiltontx
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Re: Lysistrata Materials

Post by donhamiltontx »

Hylander and mwh, thanks to both. I ordered Sommerstein.

Note to anyone else thinking about buying Sommerstein's edition: Amazon lists a Kindle version of the book for $0.99. Hard to beat that price, but the 99 cent Kindle book is not the Sommerstein edition.

donhamiltontx
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Re: Lysistrata Materials

Post by donhamiltontx »

Thanks again to Hylander and mwh for recommending Sommerstein. And thanks to both Sommerstein and Henderson, reading Lysistrata was a pleasure. Now I'm going to give Clouds a go. Sommerstein's edition of Clouds seems to be arranged on the same principles as his Lysistrata, so I ordered a copy of it to go along with a Clarendon 1989 paperback edition of K. J. Dover that I already have.

mwh
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Re: Lysistrata Materials

Post by mwh »

Dover’s edition was groundbreaking and in many ways remains exemplary, but now I expect that Sommerstein is all you need ( I haven’t actually used it myself). Since you already have Dover, however, there’s certainly no harm in using that as an additional resource.

(The advice in lines 740-2, 743-5, and 761-3, in my view, is given not by Socrates but by the chorus, just like 700-6, 708, and 716. I don’t know if Sommerstein has anything to say about the attributions here.)

It's a play that leaves a bad taste in the mouth, given Socrates' fate.

donhamiltontx
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Re: Lysistrata Materials

Post by donhamiltontx »

Thank you for the further recommendations and comments.
The two versions of Socrates that Plato and Aristophanes left us make for one of the real conundrums of history. How could both of them be describing the same man? Aristophanes never comes out looking good, and one can only think and hope he surely did not intend his comedy to lead to state murder nor take any satisfaction from it.
However that may be, I look forward to reading Clouds.

mwh
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Re: Lysistrata Materials

Post by mwh »

No I’m sure Aristophanes didn’t mean his comedy to lead to “state murder” as you put it (or was it merely democracy in action?), and it’s wrong to say that it did, whatever Plato may have thought. The most we can say is that the play may have somehow contributed to the later prejudice against Socrates and his behavior. He rubbed people the wrong way, and no wonder. Even readers of Plato can find him insufferable. Be that as it may, Aristophanes’ and Plato’s portrayals are clearly of the same man. Aristophanes didn’t aim to give an accurate depiction.

Enjoy the play, which you can do with a clean conscience.

jcabraham
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Re: Lysistrata Materials

Post by jcabraham »

donhamiltontx wrote: Wed Dec 26, 2018 4:51 pm Expecting to read Lysistrata in the very near future, I have on hand Jeffrey Henderson's Clarendon Paperbacks edition originally published 1987. Is there anything more recent than Henderson, as discussed in this Textkit thread viewtopic.php?f=2&t=63766&p=174516&hili ... ta#p174516 ?
Henderson is also the author of "The Maculate Muse," a trailblazing study of obscenity in Attic comedy, which makes him well suited to the Lysistrata. One interesting element of that play is the extensive use of the Doric dialect which Ar. puts into the mouths of the Spartans. This is the only significant extant Doric dialect except for Alcman and one reported inscription in Thucydides. The apparatus bristles with the failed efforts of Byzantine scribes to come to grips with it. I'm not sure how well that comes through in Sommerstein, though.

donhamiltontx
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Re: Lysistrata Materials

Post by donhamiltontx »

mwh wrote: Sun Jan 27, 2019 12:27 am No I’m sure Aristophanes didn’t mean his comedy to lead to “state murder” as you put it (or was it merely democracy in action?), and it’s wrong to say that it did, whatever Plato may have thought. The most we can say is that the play may have somehow contributed to the later prejudice against Socrates and his behavior. He rubbed people the wrong way, and no wonder. Even readers of Plato can find him insufferable. Be that as it may, Aristophanes’ and Plato’s portrayals are clearly of the same man. Aristophanes didn’t aim to give an accurate depiction.

Enjoy the play, which you can do with a clean conscience.
It does whet my appetite to know more about the interactions of the "1%" of Athenian society in those days. Not that I'm holding my breath. Thanks again.

donhamiltontx
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Re: Lysistrata Materials

Post by donhamiltontx »

jcabraham wrote: Tue Jan 29, 2019 4:32 am
donhamiltontx wrote: Wed Dec 26, 2018 4:51 pm Expecting to read Lysistrata in the very near future, I have on hand Jeffrey Henderson's Clarendon Paperbacks edition originally published 1987. Is there anything more recent than Henderson, as discussed in this Textkit thread viewtopic.php?f=2&t=63766&p=174516&hili ... ta#p174516 ?
Henderson is also the author of "The Maculate Muse," a trailblazing study of obscenity in Attic comedy, which makes him well suited to the Lysistrata. One interesting element of that play is the extensive use of the Doric dialect which Ar. puts into the mouths of the Spartans. This is the only significant extant Doric dialect except for Alcman and one reported inscription in Thucydides. The apparatus bristles with the failed efforts of Byzantine scribes to come to grips with it. I'm not sure how well that comes through in Sommerstein, though.
Disclaimer: I am a mere layman in Ancient Greek and less than that, if possible, in textual matters. But here goes.
After looking through Sommerstein again, I still don't have much of an answer for the Byzantine scribes' perplexity. As far as I can tell, he used collations lent to him by Jeffrey Henderson, to which he added his own collations of the Parisinus Regius 2715 and Neopolitanus II D 49 (see pages 9-10 of Sommerstein's book). He as well refers the reader to a discussion of the history of the text in Henderson's edition of Lysistrata.
I took a glance at a little bit of the dialogue of Lampito, from which I will give just one line
οὔχ, ἇς πόδας κ᾽ ἔχωντι ταὶ τριήρεες, l. 173, for which there are two variants. One of them is that ἔχωντι, Doric according to LSJ, was changed from ἔχοντι in the codices. Obviously there is a good deal more than that of Spartan dialogue in the play.
As for Sommerstein's translation, where I feel on more comfortable ground, it makes no attempt that I can see to distinguish Lampito's language from the language of the Athenians. I know that Jack Lindsay's translation, used at Perseus, does attempt to show a difference, apparently trying to give Lampito a Scottish accent (?).
Lindsay's translation starts at http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/tex ... 3Acard%3D1, accessed today.
The paperback of Henderson's edition that I have is a Clarendon paperback from 1990 (original date 1987).
Alan H. Sommerstein's edition is a reprint with corrections from Aris & Phillips Ltd, Warminster, 1998 (original date 1990).

mwh
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Re: Lysistrata Materials

Post by mwh »

I took a glance at a little bit of the dialogue of Lampito, from which I will give just one line
οὔχ, ἇς πόδας κ᾽ ἔχωντι ταὶ τριήρεες, l. 173, for which there are two variants. One of them is that ἔχωντι, Doric according to LSJ, was changed from ἔχοντι in the codices. Obviously there is a good deal more than that of Spartan dialogue in the play.
The manuscripts’ ἔχοντι is 3pl. indic. (Attic ἔχουσι). Editors’ ἔχωντι (Attic ἔχωσι) makes it subjunctive, consistent with the editorial addition of κ’ (Attic ἄν). Before that, ἇς πόδας (Attic εως ποδας) is also corrupted in the manuscripts.
So even more editorial intervention that usual is required to restore the true text (if it is the true text). Scribes are used to Attic and routinely mess up when it comes to Spartan, or Aristophanic Spartan (which may be no more authentic than an Englishman’s “Scotttish.”) But then, scribes often mess up anyway.

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