The two most systematic studies in this area are C. T. Murphy, ‘Aristophanes and the Art of Rhetoric’, HSCP 49 (1938), pp. 69-113 and W. E. Major, Aristophanes, Enemy of Rhetoric (Diss. Indiana: 1996). M. de Fatima de Sousa e Silva, ‘Critica a Retdrica na Comedia de Aristhfanes’, Humanitas 39/40 (1987/88), pp. 43-104, examines the use of rhetoric as a tool of characterization in the comedies. R. M. Harriott, Aristophanes Poet & Dramatist (Baltimore: 1986), pp. 27-67, devotes two chapters to ‘Aristophanes the Orator’, examining various speeches in the plays as examples of forensic or epideictic oratory, but the commentary is very general in nature. On the epirrhematic agOon, which can be viewed as a rhetorical debate, see T. Gelzer, Der epirrhematische Agon bei Aristophanes (Munich: 1960), and on rhetoric in the parabasis, see R. M. Harriott, Aristophanes Poet & Dramatist (cited above) and T. K. Hubbard, The Mask of Comedy: Aristophanes and the Intertextual Parabasis (Ithaca: 1991). On the contest in Frogs and its relation to early stylistic theory, see N. O’Sullivan, Alcidamas, Aristophanes and the Beginnings of Greek Stylistic Theory (Stuttgart: 1992). For systematic treatment of Aristophanes’ relation to the sophists, see E. de Carli, Aristofane e la
Sofistica (Florence: 1971). On rhetoric in Clouds in particular, see D. E. O’Regan, Rhetoric, Comedy, and the Violence of Language (New York: 1992). C. H. Whitman, Aristophanes and the Comic Hero (Cambridge, MA: 1964), pp. 167-199, reads Birds as a meditation on the power of rhetoric and manipulation of language; in the same vein, but with a post-structuralist bent, see G. W. Dobrov, ‘Language, Fiction, and Utopia’, in G. W. Dobrov (ed.), The City as Comedy: Society and Representation in Athenian Drama (Chapel Hill: 1997), pp. 95-132.
World History
