The story
Aristophanes was an Athenian playwright whose comedies are the only complete examples of Greek Old Comedy. His earliest surviving play, The Acharnians, won first prize at the Lenaia festival in 425 BCE, during the Peloponnesian War. In it, a farmer named Dikaiopolis grows tired of the war and makes a private peace treaty with Sparta. Eleven of his roughly forty plays survive, including The Clouds, The Wasps, The Birds, Lysistrata and The Frogs.
Old Comedy was a loud mixture of fantasy plots, a singing chorus, obscene jokes and open mockery of real citizens, including the demagogue Cleon, whom Aristophanes attacked in The Knights in 424 BCE. The Clouds (423 BCE) caricatured Socrates, and Plato later blamed that image in part for Athenian suspicion of him. In Lysistrata (411 BCE), women end the war by refusing sex to their husbands. In The Frogs (405 BCE), the god Dionysus goes to the underworld to bring back a dead tragedian, and Aeschylus and Euripides argue over their art. Aristophanes remained popular after antiquity, was translated and staged through the Renaissance, and the politics of his plays continue to be debated by scholars and audiences.
Why it mattered
- Aristophanes preserved the only full text of Old Comedy, a form that mixes politics, fantasy and satire.
- His portrait of Socrates in The Clouds became part of the evidence scholars use for how Athenians saw philosophers.
- Lysistrata and The Frogs gave later theater models for antiwar comedy and literary criticism on stage.
Sources
- Aristophanes World History Encyclopedia
- Ancient Greek Comedy World History Encyclopedia
- Aristophanes (Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography) Perseus Digital Library
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