ARISTOPHANES

Aristophanes of Athens (ca. 450 - 385/80 BCE)

Together with his contemporaries Eupolis and Cratinus, Aristophanes counts as one of the three greatest representatives of Old Attic Comedy. Of the 40-44 plays that were once attributed to him we still possess 11. His career started in 427 BCE with the now lost Banqueters (Daitalês). This play drew its comedy out of the conflicts of an old-fashioned father and his similarly-minded son with the renegate second son who has become enthralled with the New Rhetoric of the Sophists, a topic that Aristophanes revisited four years later in Clouds (Nephelai, 423 BCE, later revised). Among his later comedies, Birds (Ornithes, 414 BCE) and Lysistrata (411 BCE) entertained their Athenian viewers with two utopian fantasies. In Birds, two elderly Athenians escape their debts and similar nuisances by fleeing to the realm of the birds where they found a new state, Cloudcuckooland (Nephelokokkygia), and make the birds rulers of gods and men. In Lysistrata, the women of Athens unite in a sex strike and block the men's access to the public treasury on the Acropolis to force them finally, after more than fourteen years, to end the Peloponnesian War. In 405 BCE, just months before the Peloponnesian War did indeed end, albeit in a disaster for Athens, Aristophanes produced The Frogs (Batrachoi) in which the long dead tragedian Aeschylus defeats the recently deceased Euripides in a funny contest in the Underworld over who should be revived to help Athens in its need. Aristophanes staged his last play, Wealth (Plutos), in 388 BCE and will have died a couple of years later.

Resources for the three plays we are reading in World Views:

Lysistrata

study guide