Until comparatively recently all translations of Aristophanes were adaptations or condensed versions, if not always as extreme as the Thomas Randolph Plutus (see p. 145–6). William Arrowsmith, perhaps the most enduring of all twentieth-century translators of both comedy and tragedy, identified why this should be so in an essay entitled ‘The lively conventions of translation’ in the series of essays on stage translation which he edited with Roger Shattuck in 1961. He pointed to what he described as ‘the hard facts of culture’, complex enough in Greek tragedy but multiplied in comedy because:

Mercifully, he provided an answer to his own question a little later, speaking for any translator of Aristophanes when he asserted that ‘Incongruity and craft make the obscene more obscene, truly obscene. And this is what the translator wants.’

Sir Kenneth Dover picked out a more fundamental issue that relates to reception: