The Birds

Translated into English verse with Introduction and Notes

[From Introduction] The Birds is not perhaps the funniest of Aristophanes' plays, but it is by general agreement the most delightful. It has not the fire of the Knights or the Wasps, nor the curiously modern issues of thought that startle us in the Clouds and the Frogs. For once the stormy dramatist has allowed himself a play of escape, escape by means of imagination into a care-free world, far away from the great war-wearied city, with its taxes and regulations and prohibitions and fines and the follies of its exasperated demos; away from mankind, creatures "so dimly alive," shadows and pursuers of shadows, toiling so much and accomplishing so little; away perhaps even from the gods who now claim to rule the world, and are making such a very poor business of it.