(ca. 450-385 b.c.) playwright
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 Pelo-ponnesian 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 Pelopon-nesian 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 Dikaipo-los 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 over-elaborate 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 ofAthenian 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.
