Aristophanes

Mr Zohran Mamdani, the 34-year-old elected mayor of New York, who has described the police as ‘racist, anti-queer and a major threat to public safety’, says that his top policy priority is implementing free universal childcare, taxing the wealthy, freezing rents, running buses for free and heaven knows what else. How very Marxist! The Greek comic writer Aristophanes (d. c. 386 bc) would have loved it. It was he who invented communism, after all, and had his audience in hysterics. His comedy Ecclesiazusae (‘Women Running the Assembly’) was produced in Athens in 391 bc. The women of Athens decide to seize power for themselves. They disguise themselves as men, enter

The publication of the new Cambridge Greek Lexicon reminded the comedian and classicist Natalie Haynes of her frustrations at school, when she found that the lexica either translated sexual vocabulary into Latin or otherwise bowdlerised it. So when she read the comic poet Aristophanes, she decided that any word she could not identify meant ‘vagina’. Fair enough, but did her school not teach her that it takes two to tango? For the sexual organs, the poet’s hysterically anarchic inventiveness draws largely on rustic images of agricultural instruments, plants, animals, birds, and food, with military images from land and sea battles added for the male organs. Many of these terms are