Complete Plays of Aristophanes (Bantam Classics)

When a foreigner asked Plato about the ways of Athens, he sent him the works of Aristophanes. There is nothing proper about these plays, they are vibrant and ribald. The Athenians were ahead of their time with the idea of free speech, and in Aristophanes they had a comic genius to make use of it. Birds is my favorite, the story of a utopia created in the sky by two dissatisfied Athenians. It's a protest against war and has some great ideas, for instance, their intercepting human sacrifices to the gods until Olympus sends an envoy to negotiate with them. In Lysistrata, the women of Athens refuse to have sex with their husbands until they end their war. Clouds satirizes the Sophists (although, unfairly, using Socrates as his victim). These are comic masterpieces.