The women of Greece agree to withhold sex from their husbands until the men make peace, and seize the treasury on the Acropolis (411 BC)
Lysistrata — the best known of all Greek comedies.
Literature · Playwrights
Aristophanes
c. 446–c. 386 BC · Greek (Athenian)
Old Comedy
Aristophanes is the only writer of Athenian Old Comedy whose plays survive — eleven of them, out of perhaps forty. Written during the Peloponnesian War, they combine obscene farce, fantastic plots and savage personal attacks on living politicians, generals and intellectuals, and are our richest source for daily life and argument in fifth-century Athens. He is usually called the father of comedy.
How to spot them
- ▸The only surviving examples of Greek Old Comedy: eleven complete plays
- ▸Fantastic premises — a city in the sky, a flight to heaven on a dung beetle, a sex strike
- ▸Named, living Athenians ridiculed by name, above all the demagogue Cleon
- ▸The parabasis, where the chorus stops the play and addresses the audience for the poet
- ▸Written through the Peloponnesian War, almost always arguing for peace
Key works
A farmer in debt sends his son to a 'Thinkery' where a barefoot philosopher hangs in a basket studying the heavens, and the Weaker Argument defeats the Stronger (423 BC)
The Clouds — the caricature of Socrates that Plato later said helped poison his reputation. It came last of three.
Two Athenians, sick of lawsuits, persuade the birds to build a walled city in the air and blockade the gods' supply of sacrificial smoke (414 BC)
The Birds — Cloudcuckooland (Nephelokokkygia).
The god of the theatre rows across to the underworld to fetch back a dead tragedian, and judges a weighing contest between two of them (405 BC)
The Frogs — reportedly honoured with a rare second performance.
An old man addicted to jury service is locked inside his own house by his son, and holds a trial of the household dog instead (422 BC)
The Wasps — a satire on the Athenian jury courts and the pay for jurors.
A vine-grower flies to heaven on a giant dung beetle to dig the goddess of peace out of the cave where War has buried her (421 BC)
Peace — staged days before the Peace of Nicias was signed.
A farmer, fed up with the war, buys a private peace treaty for himself alone while Athens fights on (425 BC)
The Acharnians — his earliest surviving play; it won first prize.
The women of Athens disguise themselves as men, pack the assembly at dawn and vote in communal property and communal sex (c. 392 BC)
Assemblywomen (Ecclesiazusae) — late work, moving towards Middle Comedy.
Key ideas
- Comedy as licensed political attack: living citizens abused by name in a state festival
- The parabasis — the chorus steps out of the plot to speak for the playwright
- Fantasy premises pursued with absolutely rigorous logic
- Nostalgia for an older, simpler Athens, and hostility to sophists, demagogues and war
Quick-fire facts
- •Eleven complete plays survive, the only surviving examples of Old Comedy
- •He was attacked or prosecuted by the politician Cleon after his lost play The Babylonians
- •The Clouds came third of three when first produced; the version we have is a later revision
- •He appears as a character in Plato's Symposium, giving the speech about humans split in half, and interrupted by hiccups
- •The Acharnians, The Knights, The Frogs and others won first prize at the Lenaia or City Dionysia
- •His plays are the chief literary source for Athenian daily life during the Peloponnesian War
- •His last plays, Assemblywomen and Wealth, show the shift towards the gentler Middle Comedy
- •Two of his sons, Araros and Philippus, were also comic poets
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Sources
- World History Encyclopedia — Aristophanes
- Alan H. Sommerstein — Aristophanes: Lysistrata and Other Plays (introduction)