Aristophanes (c. 448 BCE - c. 386 BCE) was a comic playwright of classical Athens and the leading representative of the tradition known as Old Comedy. [1] He wrote perhaps forty plays, of which eleven survive complete, making him the only Old Comic dramatist whose work can be read in full. His comedies combine obscene farce, fantastic plots and lyric poetry with sharp political and literary satire directed at the leaders, intellectuals and institutions of wartime Athens. [2]
Life
Little is known with certainty about Aristophanes' life, and most of what survives is inferred from his plays and from scattered later notices. He was born in Athens around the middle of the fifth century BCE, was associated with the deme of Kydathenaion, and appears to have had family connections with the island of Aegina. He staged his first comedies while still young, initially through other producers. He died in Athens around 386 BCE, leaving sons who also wrote comedies. [1]
He appears as a character in Plato's Symposium, where he delivers a celebrated speech on the origins of love, evidence that he remained a recognisable figure in Athenian intellectual life. [3]
The comedies
Aristophanes wrote for the two main Athenian dramatic festivals, the City Dionysia and the Lenaia, where comedies competed for prizes before large civic audiences. His surviving plays include The Acharnians, The Knights, The Clouds, The Wasps, Peace, The Birds, Lysistrata, Thesmophoriazusae, The Frogs, Assemblywomen and Wealth. [2]
The typical structure sets an ordinary citizen against an intolerable situation, has him adopt an absurd remedy, and then follows the consequences: a farmer makes a private peace treaty with Sparta, a chorus of birds builds a city in the sky, the women of Greece withhold sex to force an end to the war. A formal section called the parabasis interrupts the action so that the chorus can address the audience directly, often in the poet's own voice. [1]
Politics and satire
Most of his career coincided with the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta, and much of his work is shaped by it. He repeatedly ridiculed the populist leader Cleon, who is said to have prosecuted him in response, and returned often to the theme of peace and the cost of the war to ordinary farmers and citizens. [2]
The Clouds caricatures Socrates as a hair-splitting natural philosopher running a "thinkery"; Plato's Apology presents this portrayal as one source of the long-standing prejudice that contributed to Socrates' trial. The Frogs stages a contest in the underworld between Aeschylus and Euripides over the proper purpose of tragedy, and is a central document for ancient literary criticism. [3]
Later work and legacy
His last surviving plays, Assemblywomen and Wealth, show a reduced role for the chorus and less direct attack on named individuals, marking the transition towards the Middle Comedy of the fourth century BCE. [1]
Because the work of his rivals, including Cratinus and Eupolis, survives only in fragments, Aristophanes effectively defines Old Comedy for modern readers. His plays influenced later comic writers from Menander and the Roman dramatists onwards, and Lysistrata in particular has been repeatedly revived and adapted as an anti-war work. [2]
