Author: ARISTOPHANES
Biography:
ARISTOPHANES (c. 460-386 BCE: OCD)
An Athenian, Aristophanes is considered the major playwright of the so-called Old Attic Comedy period. He was born probably between 460-450 BCE. Little is known about his life and attempts to read biographical information from his plays should be treated with caution. Just eleven of his plays survive; they are known to have been produced in Athens between 425 and 388. Aristophanes’s comedies use parody and satire to skewer politicians, philosophers, and his fellow playwrights. Of his translators listed here, Richard Cumberland, H. F. Cary, and C. Dunster have headnotes of their own. Edmund Frederick John Carrington explains in the preface to his Plutus that he selected the play for the general nature of the subject—that is, “the unreasonableness of being discontented with the order in which things had been allotted by Heaven.” Carrington was the son of Codrington Edmund Carrington, a barrister who served the EIC in Kolkata (Calcutta) and was MP for St. Mawes (1826-31) and his first wife Paulina Belli. Edmund was born in India probably in 1803. He matriculated at Queen’s College, Oxford, on 14 Apr. 1820 (BA 1823, MA 1827) and was called to the bar at both the Middle Temple and Lincoln’s Inn in 1829. He married Susanna Eveleigh probably in about 1840; they had one son. The family lived in Paignton, Devon, where he died on 14 May 1874. The Rev. Rowland Smith, translator of The Ecclesiazusae, or Female Parliament, was a son of John and Rebecca Smith of Huntingfield, Kent, and was baptised at Eastling, Kent, on 13 Mar. 1807. He matriculated at St. John’s College, Oxford, on 25 Mar. 1825 (BA 1828, MA 1831) and was ordained priest in 1831. He married Elizabeth Caroline Van Heythuysen (d 1865) at St. Andrew’s, Holborn, on 8 Feb. 1831; they had four children. Smith served successively as rector of Ilerton, Pembroke; Nazeing, Essex; and of Swyncombe, Oxford. By 1891 he had moved to lodgings in Brighton, Sussex, where he died on 22 July 1895. His The Church Catechism was first published in 1847. (OCD 14 Mar. 2025; ancestry.co.uk 14 Mar. 2025; Alumni Oxonienses; CCEd 14 Mar. 2025; historyofparliamentonline.com 14 Mar. 2025) SR