Aristophanes

Almost everything we know about Aristophanes comes from his plays. He was born around 446 BC, an Athenian citizen of the deme Kydathenaion, and grew up during the glory years of Pericles. He was still very young when his first comedy, Δαιταλείς (The Banqueters), was staged in 427 BC under the name of a producer, apparently because he was too young to apply for a chorus himself. His second play, Βαβυλώνιοι (The Babylonians, 426 BC), attacked the powerful politician Cleon, who reportedly took him to court; Aristophanes answered by mocking Cleon even harder in Ιππής (The Knights, 424 BC), which won first prize.

His whole career unfolded during the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta (431–404 BC), and peace is his constant theme. He wrote for the two comic festivals of Athens, the Lenaia in winter and the City Dionysia in spring, competing against rivals such as Cratinus and Eupolis. He won first prize with Αχαρνής (The Acharnians, 425 BC), The Knights and Βάτραχοι (The Frogs, 405 BC), which was so admired that the city granted it a second performance, an honour never given to a comedy before.

After Athens lost the war he kept writing, but the mood had changed: his last two plays, Εκκλησιάζουσαι (Women at the Assembly, c. 392 BC) and Πλούτος (Wealth, 388 BC), are gentler and less political. He had three sons, one of whom, Araros, produced his final comedies. He died around 386 BC.

Eleven comedies survive. The early war plays are the sharpest: in The Acharnians a farmer makes a private peace treaty with Sparta and enjoys it alone; in Ειρήνη (Peace, 421 BC) a vine-grower flies to heaven on a giant dung beetle to rescue the goddess Peace; in Lysistrata (411 BC) the women of Greece refuse to sleep with their husbands until the men stop fighting. The Clouds (423 BC) shows Socrates hanging in a basket, studying the sky and teaching young men to win bad arguments; Socrates later said at his trial that this caricature had poisoned the jury against him. Σφήκες (The Wasps, 422 BC) laughs at the Athenian love of jury duty.

The Birds (414 BC), his longest and most beautiful play, has two Athenians persuade the birds to build Νεφελοκοκκυγία (Cloud-cuckoo-land) between earth and heaven and starve the gods into surrender. The Frogs sends the god Dionysus down to the underworld to bring back a dead poet, and stages a contest between Aeschylus and Euripides, complete with the frogs' chorus «Βρεκεκεκὲξ κοὰξ κοάξ». Θεσμοφοριάζουσαι (Women at the Thesmophoria, 411 BC) has the women of Athens put Euripides on trial for slandering them.

His comedies mix slapstick, puns, songs of great lyric beauty, parodies of tragedy and direct attacks on real people sitting in the audience. In the parabasis the chorus stepped forward and addressed the citizens in the poet's own voice, scolding them about politics. Nothing was off-limits: politicians, generals, philosophers, gods, and the audience itself.

Every summer the Athens Epidaurus Festival stages an Aristophanes comedy in the ancient theatre, and Greek audiences still roar at jokes about taxes and politicians that are 2,400 years old. Karolos Koun's production of The Birds in 1959 caused a scandal in Athens and then triumphed abroad, and his Art Theatre made Aristophanes a modern classic. The word Νεφελοκοκκυγία is used in Greek for any fantasy project, and Λυσιστράτη has become a symbol of women's protest worldwide. Plato made Aristophanes a character in the Συμπόσιον (Symposium), where he tells the myth of the first humans split in two and searching for their other half, a story this site retells. Excerpts of The Birds and The Clouds are read in Greek schools, and the adjective «αριστοφανικός» (Aristophanic) still describes any biting, bawdy political satire.

• Plato put a speech in his mouth in the Symposium: the myth that humans were once double creatures, cut in half by Zeus, and that love is the search for our lost half.
• In The Clouds Socrates says «ἀεροβατῶ καὶ περιφρονῶ τὸν ἥλιον»: in ancient Greek «περιφρονῶ» meant «I contemplate», but in Modern Greek it means «I despise», so the line sounds today like «I despise the sun».
• The Frogs is the only ancient comedy we know to have been granted a second performance by vote of the city.
• Socrates sat in the audience of The Clouds; a later anecdote claims he stood up so that the foreigners present could see who was being mocked.