About the Book:This book brings together fourteen studies by Alan Sommerstein on Aristophanes and his fellow comic dramatists, some of which have not previously appeared in print. The studies cover almost all the major topics of Sommerstein’s work – the nature and functions of comedy in Aristophanes’ time, its connections with the society and politics of its day, the question of Aristophanes’ own political stances, the light comedy can throw on classical Athenians’ perception of basic social divisions (age, gender, citizen/alien, free/slave), comedy’s exploitation of the expressive resources of the Greek language, the composition and production history of individual plays, and the history of the genre as a whole.