"This riotous play from ancient Greece's greatest comic dramatist blends fancy dress, earthy slapstick and political debate" --

"The Clouds" vigorously bares the folly of the old and new morality and ends hilariously with Strepsiades thrashed by his newly educated son -- while the old god Hermes has the last word. The play is set in the Athens of the 5th century B.C., where men have forgotten the gods and turned to rhetoric and dreams. Aristophanes ridicules the degenerate old order as well as the Sophistic new. -- From publisher's description

The Wasps is the fourth in chronological order of the eleven surviving plays by Aristophanes. It was produced at the Lenaia festival in 422 BC, during Athens' short-lived respite from the Peloponnesian War. As in his other early plays, Aristophanes satirizes the Athenian general and demagogue Cleon.