Born in Attica near Athens,Aristophanes became a
playwright as a fairly young man; his first play,
Banqueters (now lost), was staged in 427 B.C., and
he penned approximately 40 comedies throughout
his life.He was profoundly influenced by the Peloponnesian
War between Athens and Sparta, which
erupted in 431 B.C. and lasted more than 25 years.
Precious little is known about Aristophanes’
life; what can be gleaned comes mainly from his 11
surviving plays, in which he attempts to cultivate
the self-image of a brilliant but underappreciated
artist. However, in his dialogue The Symposium,
the philosopher PLATO portrays Aristophanes as a
rascal. In Plato’s work, Aristophanes gathers with
other erudite and prominent Athenians at the
home of tragic poet Agathon and admits to having
spent the previous day carousing. After attempting
various tactics to cure a violent case of
the hiccups, Aristophanes narrates an entertaining
and fanciful account of the origins of sexual desire
that nevertheless manages to reveal his sophisticated
intellect, learnedness, and familiarity with
the scholarly theories of the day.
Critics defer to Aristophanes as a satirist of the
highest order, and his work represents the only extant
examples of Old Comedy, which is characterized,
in part, by farcical plots, satire, and social and
political commentary. Aristophanes caricatures
self-important individuals as being dim-witted
and foolish. He indiscriminately mocks theories
of education, intellectuals, poets, women’s suffrage,
religion, and political systems, including
democracy. In addition, he criticizes the affectations
of civil society by alluding to bodily functions,
indelicate acts, and parts of the anatomy
usually not discussed in polite company. No fantasy
was too outrageous for Aristophanes to imagine,
and no subject was immune to his brutal,
bawdy, and often vulgar wit.Yet his poetic dialogue
at times reveals a tender, sympathetic soul. His
protagonists are often underdogs, such as rural
farmers and women, who have no real power or influence
but who, in the world of the play, realize
fantastic dreams.
Part of Aristophanes’ breadth can be understood
in context: Athenians enjoyed absolute freedom
of speech during most of Aristophanes’ life.
Nevertheless, when Babylonians (426 B.C.) was presented
at the Great Dionysia, an annual festival
held to honor the god Dionysus, the demogogue
Cleon denounced Aristophanes for ridiculing the
city’s elected magistrates before numerous foreign
visitors.
Though Cleon’s charge was serious, Aristophanes
was not prosecuted, and he exacted revenge
in his next two productions. In the Acharnians
(425 B.C.), in which the farmer Dikaipolos arranges
a one-man truce with Sparta to end the Peloponnesian
War, one scene shows Aristophanes’ version
of the indictment.Worse, Knights (424 B.C.) depicts
Cleon as the grasping and unscrupulous slave of a
foolish old man, Demos, who symbolizes the
Athenian people.When Demos plans to replace
him, Cleon attempts to curry favor in an uproarious
display of self-abasement. Both plays were
awarded first prize in the theatrical contests at
Lenaia.
Clouds, first produced in 423 B.C. and later revised,
spoofs intellectuals, modern theories of education,
and even the great philosopher SOCRATES,
who is suspended in air, suggesting he is less than
firmly rooted in reality. Aristophanes returns to
political satire in Wasps (422 B.C.), wherein the
democratic jury system, which the Athenians held
in high esteem, becomes the target of his comic
savagery. The play features an old man with a consuming
passion for jury service because it allows
him to wield irresponsible power and deliver harsh
punishments. His son argues that the power belongs
to the prosecutors who use the jurors to
exact revenge on enemies. Father and son set up a
mock court in which a dog prosecutes another dog
for stealing some cheese, and the old man is tricked
into voting for acquittal. The singers and dancers
of the chorus dress as wasps to suggest that those
who would spend their days on jury duty are peevish
and predisposed to find fault.
Peace won second prize at the Great Dionysia
in 421 B.C., when the Peace of Nicias was being negotiated between Athens and Sparta. Like Dikaipolos
of Acharnians, Trygaios is a war-weary farmer
who takes matters into his own hands. He fattens
up a dung-beetle to immense proportions and
then flies it to Mount Olympus to appeal to the
gods for peace. The next surviving play, Birds, received
the second prize at the Great Dionysia in
414 B.C. Three years later, the renewed conflict between
Athens and Sparta provided the subject
matter for Lysistrata (411 B.C.). In this play, the
women of Athens and Sparta go on strike, withholding
conjugal relations to force their warrior
husbands to reconcile with their enemies. To this
day, Lysistrata is performed to express antiwar sentiment.
Like his other plays, Frogs (405 B.C.) shows
Aristophanes using comedy for a serious purpose.
On the surface, the action parodies Greece’s eminent
poets and the gods themselves. The playwrights
SOPHOCLES and EURIPIDES have died, leaving
Athens with no important living tragedian, so
Dionysus travels to the underworld to retrieve Euripides.
To the latter’s indignation, Dionysus returns
instead with AESCHYLUS, whose poetry had
been weighed on a scale like so much cheese and
found to be more substantial, weighted, Aristophanes
suggests, by ponderous language and overelaborate
syntax. In reality, Aristophanes took
seriously the poet’s ability to sway public opinion,
and Frogs reached its audience at a time when
Athenian morale was flagging and the preservation
of the city was at stake.
The Peloponnesian War came to an end in 404
B.C. when the people of Athens surrendered to
Sparta. The conquerors installed an oligarchy, a
form of government in which power is in the
hands of a few, to replace democracy. This greatly
impeded free speech. As a result, Aristophanes’
final comedies lack the bite of his earlier plays and
feature few direct references to current events.
Critical Analysis
Birds (414 B.C.) is considered Aristophanes’
utopian tour de force, boasting a fantastical plot,
splendid costumes, exuberant dialogue, and graceful
lyric poetry.Wearied by the constant taxation
and litigation that are part of Athenian life, two citizens,
Peisetairos and a companion, seek a more
suitable place to live. They visit the mythical
hoopoe bird in the hopes that he has spied an appealing
metropolis from the air but decide instead
to build their own utopia in the sky from which
they can reign over all humankind. The hoopoe
gives the Athenians a potion that causes them to
sprout awkward wings, and the new city is dubbed
“Cloudcukooland.” Immediately, the self-serving
opportunists appear: a priest who attempts to ingratiate
himself by reciting a list of bird-gods; a
fortune-teller who offers his services for a fee; and
officials who threaten legal action if the new city
doesn’t comply with various regulations.
The gods are furthermore enraged by the Athenians’
presumption, and a battle ensues. At last, a
divine embassy arrives in Cloudcukooland to resolve
the conflict, and Peisetairos arranges a luncheon
consisting of birds “condemned for revolting
against the democratic birds.”The gluttonous gods
agree to a truce. In the end, the utopian city is no
less politically corrupt, imperialistic, or bureaucratic
than Athens; and Peisetairos is no less arrogant
and ineffectual than any of the demagogues
whose government he was fleeing.
Contemporary audiences continue to enjoy
Birds for many reasons, not the least of which is its
spectacle: the magnificently arrayed chorus of
birds, each with a distinctive call; the appearance of
a messenger goddess via theatrical crane; and the
final battle between the Athenians and the birds, in
which the men’s weapons consist of cooking utensils.
The action of the play aptly illustrates the
qualities which continue to make Aristophanes’
work accessible and appealing: His conflicts are
relevant, his characters have complex personalities,
and his ideals always suffer tragic defeat when
meeting with the real world.
The New Comedy introduced with MENANDER
eventually replaced the Old, but Aristophanes continued
to fascinate audiences, perhaps because ARISTOTLE
included him in his widely influential
Poetics. Eugene O’Neill, Jr., in Seven Famous Greek
Plays, credits the playwright with a timeless appeal,
saying, “There has never been anything quite like
the comic drama of Aristophanes, and regrettably
there will never be anything quite like it again.”His
“exceptionally high intellect and inexhaustibly fertile
imagination” are expressed in “concentrations
of splendid and dazzling conceits which follow one
another in breathless abundance,” while the “soft
side of his personality expresses itself in his lyrics,”
which astound and delight. His plays seek to instruct
as well as entertain, and with this blend of
motives, Aristophanes set a standard by which all
great art is judged.
English Versions of Works by Aristophanes
Aristophanes 1. 3 vols. Edited by David R. Slavitt and
Palmer Bovie. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1998.
Four Plays by Aristophanes: Clouds, Birds, Lysistrata,
Frogs. Translated by William Arrowsmith, Richmond
Lattimore, and Douglass Parker. New
American Library, 1984.
Works about Aristophanes
Dover, K. J. Aristophanic Comedy. Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1972.
MacDowell, Douglas M. Aristophanes and Athens.
Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Spatz, Lois. Aristophanes. Boston: Twayne Publishers,
1978.