“... domestic picture remained virtually unchanged, with all its prejudices intact. Athens remained (as Aristophanes’ plays make all too clear) a hive of class prejudice (Euripides’ mother selling vegetables in the market was always good for a laugh); while the contempt among the upper crust for both trade and artisans (however highly skilled), and hence for ...”

“... and Lycurgus, the histories of Xenophon and Thucydides, and plays and poems by Euripides, Aristophanes and Pindar – in order to re-examine a number of facets of life in democratic Athens, including the daily activities of men and women, buying and selling, participation in legal cases, and a selection of major festivals and rituals. He throws out ...”

“... The ‘splitting’ androgyne must come apart before it can come together again and be sexy; Aristophanes’ fable in Plato’s Symposium imagines that the three original creatures were a combined man and woman, a combined man and man, and a combined woman and woman, who were split in half; ever since, each half of each pair has been trying to get back ...”

“... by the lines they spoke, the same was not true of the poets who wrote them. A famous passage in Aristophanes shows the poet Agathon becoming womanish in order to write a female part and writers generally were closely identified with their words. From an early stage the tragedians were quoted out of context for general observations on life, the Universe and ...”

“... tasks they perform. The model for the book, DeWitt has said, was Mel Brooks’s The Producers, via Aristophanes; but she’s happy to acknowledge an affinity with Swift’s A Modest Proposal.In August 1736, a couple of months after his 48th birthday, Alexander Pope wondered to Swift whether ‘increase of years’ might not make people ‘more talkative but ...”

“... mislocating the Forum and similar mistakes. Their creativity with insults – they used names from Aristophanes’ Clouds – was as impressive as their erudition.But disciplinary border-crossing, collaboration and conversation were just as common. Leonardo Bufalini, whose map of the city appeared in 1551, added a self-portrait, complete with surveyors’ and ...”

“... to the Spartans, this enfant terrible still remained, even as a penniless exile, the subject (as Aristophanes makes clear in The Frogs) of intense discussion in Athens. In the last resort, as the Athenians edged nearer to final defeat in their agonisingly prolonged conflict with the Spartans, there were still many who believed – whatever his chequered past ...”

“... that end in silence, and both make comedy out of all kinds of failure. Murdoch links them with Aristophanes, Shakespeare, Sterne and the Marx Brothers. I don’t know whether Murdoch ever wrote to Beckett, but she certainly said to Queneau: ‘I wish I had a mind like yours. I love and covet your mind like I never have anyone’s.’ And more ...”

“... here just as Nietzsche envisaged it, ‘a kind of comedy. Mediterranean brightness and frivolity; Aristophanes hooting Plato off the stage’. This is a strange, slightly convoluted argument (note the none too dainty pirouette on the word ‘outside’, for example), yet in many ways it is very persuasive. In 1923, Picasso was spouting Nietzscheanisms like ...”

“... could be dusted off by demagogues whenever there was a crisis or a decision of great moment. Aristophanes has great fun in Knights satirising this political use of oracles by dodgy politicians; it seems as if demagogues kept them to hand so they could dramatically pull out a piece of paper and wave it in the audience’s face at the right time. Delphi ...”

“... the view of Plato’s Cratylus that there is an intrinsic relationship between name and nature. Aristophanes has Dicaeopolis (‘just city’) and Lysistrata (‘disbander of armies’). Plautus has a braggart soldier called Pyrgopolynices, whose name suggests either ‘conqueror of many fortresses’ or ‘many burning conflicts’, but either way is ...”

“... other, to be inside each other’. He posits a dialectic of neediness and autarky prefigured in Aristophanes’ just-so story about sexual dimorphism in the Symposium, and in the Echo and Narcissus myth in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Hermeneutic fixity is chimerical or hermaphroditic, a wilful travesty of contradiction in the name of totality. Lefort drily ...”

“... we are getting a more positive version of ancient female power. One staple of the modern stage is Aristophanes’ comedy known by the name of its lead female character, Lysistrata. Written in the fifth century bc, it appears to be a perfect mixture of highbrow classics, feisty feminism, a stop-the-war agenda and a good sprinkling of smut (and it was once ...”

“... Hazlitt came to list the ‘four chief names of comic humour out of our language’ he cited ‘Aristophanes and Lucian among the Ancients, Molière and Rabelais among the Moderns’. A good choice. Rabelais is at ease in such company. He was the kind of author who digests and transmutes others. His debts to Lucian’s irreverent laughter are clear. He ...”

“... him a very slovenly beau’. Variously called the ‘Hogarth of the stage’ and the ‘English Aristophanes’ – in both cases rather flatteringly – Foote included among his fans Dr Johnson (‘For a broad laugh I must confess the scoundrel has no fellow’) and Edward Gibbon, who told his sister in a letter: ‘When I am tired of the Roman Empire I ...”