Old Persian in Athens Revisited (Ar. Ach. 100)

The Old Persian line in Aristophanes' Acharnians (100) is commonly believed to contain nothing but comic gibberish. Against this view, it is argued here that a responsible reconstruction of an Old Persian original is possible if one takes into account what we nowadays know about late fifth-century Old Persian. Moreover, the result, whose central element is the Persian verb for 'writing',fits in with both general considerations on linguistic realism in drama and the historical reality of diplomatic interaction between Greece and Persia during the Peloponnesian War

Ancient history · Art · Comics · Drama · Epistemology · Linguistics · Literature · Nothing · Persian · Realism · Verb · Ancient Near East History · Classical Antiquity Studies · Classical Philosophy and Thought · Classics · History · Philosophy