Other Fiction Aristophanes: Aristophanes and War, v1, 19 May 2014

[AlexBell]

Aristophanes lived in Athens from about 450BC to about 385BC. Three of his eleven extant plays deal with the Peloponnesian War. Little is known about him, including how much he was opposed to the war or how much he was playing to his audiences' feelings about the war to gain prizes at the festivals where the plays were presented.

The Peloponnesian War, 431-404BC, was started on pretexts and continued for glory, power, or money, caused enormous civilian suffering and devastation, and left Athens infested by informers. One difference from 21st century wars is that then most leaders led young men to their deaths rather than sending them to their deaths.

The Acharnians was presented in 426BC. Dicaeopolis establishes his own private peace treaty with the Spartans, and deals with those who fear it will prevent them from taking revenge, those who want the blessings of peace without making peace themselves, and the informers. In Peace, presented in 422BC, Trygaeus flies to heaven on a giant dung beetle to protest to the gods about the war. He discovers that the gods have become so angry at the Greeks that they have buried Peace in a cave, and left War to grind the Greek states to dust. He rescues Peace and marries one of her hand maidens. The most famous play of the three is Lysistrata, presented in 411BC, in which Lysistrata persuades the women of the warring states to refuse sexual favours to their husbands or lovers until a peace treaty is signed. The males around her were even more offended that Lysistrata showed that women could think and plan and manage.

The source texts for Aristophanes and War were taken via Project Gutenberg from literal translations published by the Athenian Society in 1912. I have retained the Introductions to the plays, the footnotes as end notes, and the stage directions from the Athenian Society translation in rounded brackets and from other translations in curly brackets. My interpolations are contained in square brackets. I have silently corrected typos, curled quotes, and made minor changes to spelling, punctuation, and hyphenation using oxforddictionaries.com.

The original texts and the translations contain material which some readers may find offensive.

PS: The ebook contains about 300 endnotes. They work as expected on my Sony, Kindle Keyboard, and iPad with Marvin. But I haven't been able to get them to work on a Kobo Touch or Nexus 7 with Mantano. I'd appreciate any feedback or suggestions.

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[DMcCunney]

Thank you!

And just for the record, the end notes basically work on a 7" Android tablet with the book viewed in FBReaderJ. They show up as links in the text, and tapping the link takes you to the end note. (Actually tapping the link on a relatively small touch screen can be an interesting exercise...)
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Dennis

[AlexBell]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Thank you!

And just for the record, the end notes basically work on a 7" Android tablet with the book viewed in FBReaderJ. They show up as links in the text, and tapping the link takes you to the end note. (Actually tapping the link on a relatively small touch screen can be an interesting exercise...)
______
Dennis

Thanks for the feedback. I haven't tried FBReader on the Nexus, but I'll check it out.

I can't make it work on the Kobo, but then I can't make ToC links work either.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by AlexBell

Thanks for the feedback. I haven't tried FBReader on the Nexus, but I'll check it out.

I can't make it work on the Kobo, but then I can't make ToC links work either.

When I got the tablet, eBook viewer was the primary use case, and FBReader got the nod as the software.

I already have the version written in C installed under Windows and Linux - it handles ePub, Mobi, and as a particular win for me, files produced for the Plucker offline HTML reader under PalmOS. I've been (and still am) a Palm user for over 15 years, and have converted about 4,000 files to Plucker documents. It was nice to be able to read them on something other than my PDA.

The Android version is a port to Java. It doesn't handle Plucker files, but does just fine on ePub and Mobi. I have a number of books in either format, and didn't want to have to do lots of Calibre format conversion. As a major plus, sent to the tablet from Calibre, metadata added in Calibre goes along, so things like multi-book series are listed by series if desired, in series order.

I'm quite pleased. Being able to read both ePub and Mobi files with the same software was an absolute requirement. The rest is a welcome fringe benefit.

I'm also doing the odd tweak in Sigil - mostly to add working tables of contents to volumes that didn't have them. Sigil also edits HTML and saves as ePub, so I'm slowly converting so stuff in only HTML format to ePub for reading on the tablet.
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Dennis

[AlexBell]

Thanks again, Dennis

[Arios]

A beautiful ePub Alex: bravo!

Have you thought about a version adding the ancient Greek and Latin texts?

I'm kidding!

I try the epub with my Kobo Touch and indeed the endnotes work on a random basis, even if the font-size of the .fn is set to 100% and vertical-align to baseline. Greater than this (100%), the epub is less harmonious.

This problem is probably related to the touch screen of the Kobo, less precise for example than the Sony PRS-T1 which can use a stylus btw.

On the Android side, have you ever used Moon+ Reader? The free version is working very well to me.

Thanks for the ePub Alex, and have a nice day/evening.

[AlexBell]

Originally Posted by Arios

A beautiful ePub Alex: bravo!

Have you thought about a version adding the ancient Greek and Latin texts?

I'm kidding!

I try the epub with my Kobo Touch and indeed the endnotes work on a random basis, even if the font-size of the .fn is set to 100% and vertical-align to baseline. Greater than this (100%), the epub is less harmonious.

This problem is probably related to the touch screen of the Kobo, less precise for example than the Sony PRS-T1 which can use a stylus btw.

On the Android side, have you ever used Moon+ Reader? The free version is working very well to me.

Thanks for the ePub Alex, and have a nice day/evening.

Thanks, Arios

I'm glad you're just kidding about the Greek and Latin texts: I don't read or speak either language, and so couldn't be sure to be able to correct typos etc. I'll probably do The Trojan Women by Euripides after the ebook I'm working on now, but only the English text.

I think you're right about the Kobo, but have bad memories of Moon+; an ebook I did with long line poetry looks fine on my Sony, Kobo, iPad, and Nexus 7 with Mantano, but looked like a dog's breakfast with Moon+. So far as I know Moon+ does not honour the publisher's CSS.