Aristophanes

—Aristophanic /euh ris'teuh fan"ik/, adj.

/ar'euh stof"euh neez'/, n.

448?-385? B.C., Athenian comic dramatist.

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born с 450

died с 388 BC

Greek playwright.

An Athenian, he began his career as a comic dramatist in 427. He wrote approximately 40 plays, of which 11 survive, including The Clouds (423), The Wasps (422), The Birds (414), Lysistrata (411), and The Frogs (405). Most of the plays typify the Old Comedy (of which they are the only extant representatives), in which mime, chorus, and burlesque were important features. His satire, wit, and merciless topical commentary made him the greatest comic dramatist of ancient Greece.

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▪ Greek dramatist

Introduction

born c. 450 BC

died c. 388 BC

      the greatest representative of ancient Greek comedy and the one whose works have been preserved in greatest quantity. He is the only extant representative of the Old Comedy, that is, of the phase of comic dramaturgy in which chorus, mime, and burlesque still played a considerable part and which was characterized by bold fantasy, merciless invective and outrageous satire, unabashedly licentious humour, and a marked freedom of political criticism. But Aristophanes belongs to the end of this phase, and, indeed, his last extant play, which has no choric element at all, may well be regarded as the only extant specimen of the short-lived Middle Comedy, which, before the end of the 4th century BC, was to be superseded in turn by the milder and more realistic social satire of the New Comedy.

Life and career

      Little is known about the life of Aristophanes, and most of the known facts are derived from references in his own plays. Born c. 450 BC, he was an Athenian citizen belonging to the deme, or clan, named Pandionis, but his actual birthplace is uncertain. (The fact that he or his father, Philippus, owned property on the island of Aegina may have been the cause of an accusation by his fellow citizens that he was not of Athenian birth.) He began his dramatic career in 427 BC with a play, the Daitaleis (The Banqueters), which appears, from surviving fragments, to have been a satire on his contemporaries' educational and moral theories. He is thought to have written about 40 plays in all. A large part of his work is concerned with the social, literary, and philosophical life of Athens itself and with themes provoked by the great Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC). This war was essentially a conflict between imperialist Athens and conservative Sparta and so was long the dominant issue in Athenian politics. Aristophanes was naturally an opponent of the more or less bellicose statesmen who controlled the government of Athens throughout the better part of his maturity. Aristophanes lived to see the revival of Athens after its defeat by Sparta. He died in about 388 BC.

Dramatic and literary achievements

      Aristophanes' reputation has stood the test of time; his plays have been frequently produced on the 20th-century stage in numerous translations, which manage with varying degrees of success to convey the flavour of Aristophanes' puns, witticisms, and topical allusions. But it is not easy to say why his comedies still appeal to an audience almost 2,500 years after they were written. In the matter of plot construction Aristophanes' comedies are often loosely put together, are full of strangely inconsequential episodes, and often degenerate at their end into a series of disconnected and boisterous episodes. Aristophanes' greatness lies in the wittiness of his dialogue; in his generally good-humoured though occasionally malevolent satire; in the brilliance of his parody, especially when he mocks the controversial tragedian Euripides; in the ingenuity and inventiveness, not to say the laughable absurdity, of his comic scenes born of imaginative fantasy; in the peculiar charm of his choric songs, whose freshness can still be conveyed in languages other than Greek; and, at least for audiences of a permissive age, in the licentious frankness of many scenes and allusions in his comedies.

The plays

Babylonians

      This comedy, which is extant only in fragments, was produced at the festival of the Great Dionysia. The festival was attended by delegates of the city-states, which were theoretically “allies” but were in practice satellites of Athens. Because Babylonians (426 BC; Greek Babylōnioi) not only virulently attacked Cleon, the demagogue then in power in Athens, but also showed the “allies” as the slaves of the Athenian Demos (a personification of the Athenian citizen electorate), Aristophanes was impeached by Cleon. Though the details are not known, he seems to have been let off lightly.

Acharnians

      This is the earliest of the 11 comedies of Aristophanes that have survived intact. Acharnians (425 BC; Greek Acharneis) is a forthright attack on the folly of the war. Its farmer-hero, Dicaeopolis, is tired of the Peloponnesian War and therefore secures a private peace treaty with the Spartans for himself in spite of the violent opposition of a chorus of embittered and bellicose old charcoal burners of Acharnae. Dicaeopolis takes advantage of his private treaty to trade with the allies of the Spartans. The Athenian commander Lamachus tries to stop him, but by the end of the play Lamachus slumps wounded and dejected while Dicaeopolis enjoys a peacetime life of food, wine, and sex.

Knights

      This play shows how little Aristophanes was affected by the prosecution he had incurred for Babylonians. Knights (424 BC; Greek Hippeis) consists of a violent attack on the same demagogue, Cleon, who is depicted as the favourite slave of the stupid and irascible Demos until he is, at last, ousted from his position of influence and authority by Agoracritus, a sausage seller who is even more scoundrelly and impudent than Cleon.

Clouds

      This play (423 BC; Greek Nephelai) is an attack on “modern” education and morals as imparted and taught by the radical intellectuals known as the Sophists (Sophist). The main victim of the play is the leading Athenian thinker and teacher Socrates, who is purposely (and unfairly) given many of the standard characteristics of the Sophists. In the play Socrates is consulted by an old rogue, Strepsiades (“Twisterson”), who wants to evade his debts. The instruction at Socrates' academy, the Phrontisterion (“Thinking Shop”), which consists of making a wrong argument sound right, enables Strepsiades' son to defend the beating of his own father. At the play's end the Phrontisterion is burned to the ground.

Wasps

      This comedy satirized the litigiousness of the Athenians in the person of the mean and waspish old man Philocleon (“Love-Cleon”), who has a passion for serving on juries. In Wasps (422 BC; Greek Sphēkes) Philocleon's son, Bdelycleon (“Loathe-Cleon”), arranges for his father to hold a “court” at home; but, since the first “case” to be heard is that of the house dog accused of the theft of a cheese, Philocleon is finally cured of his passion for the law courts and instead becomes a boastful and uproarious drunkard. The play's main political target is the exploitation by Cleon of the Athenian system of large subsidized juries.

Peace

      This play was staged seven months or so after both Cleon and Brasidas, the two main champions of the war policy on the Athenian and Spartan sides respectively, had been killed in battle and, indeed, only a few weeks before the ratification of the Peace of Nicias (? March 421 BC), which suspended hostilities between Athens and Sparta for six uneasy years. In Peace (421 BC; Greek Eirēnē) the war-weary farmer Trygaeus (“Vintager”) flies to heaven on a monstrous dung beetle to find the lost goddess Peace, only to discover that the God of War has buried Peace in a pit. With the help of a chorus of farmers Trygaeus rescues her, and the play ends with a joyful celebration of marriage and fertility.

Birds

      This play can be regarded merely as a “comedy of fantasy,” but some scholars see Birds (414 BC; Greek Ornithes) as a political satire on the imperialistic dreams that had led the Athenians to undertake their ill-fated expedition of 415 BC to conquer Syracuse in Sicily. Peisthetaerus (“Trusty”) is so disgusted with his city's bureaucracy that he persuades the birds to join him in building a new city that will be suspended in between heaven and earth; it is named Nephelokokkygia and is the original Cloudcuckooland. The city is built, and Peisthetaerus and his bird comrades must then fend off the undesirable humans who want to join them in their new Utopia. He and the birds finally even starve the Olympian gods into cooperating with them. Birds is Aristophanes' most fantastical play, but its escapist mood possibly echoes the dramatist's sense of Athens' impending decline.

Lysistrata

      This comedy was written not long after the catastrophic defeat of the Athenian expedition to Sicily (413 BC) and not long before the revolt of the Four Hundred in Athens, whereby an oligarchic regime ready to make peace with Sparta was set up (411 BC). Lysistrata (411 BC; Greek Lysistratē) depicts the seizure of the Acropolis and of the treasury of Athens by the city's women who, at Lysistrata's instigation, have, together with all the women of Greece, declared a sex strike until such time as the men will make peace. The women defy their menfolk until the peace is arranged, after which both the Athenian and Spartan wives are reunited with their husbands. The play is a strange mixture of humour, indecency, gravity, and farce.

Women at the Thesmophoria

      In Women at the Thesmophoria (411 BC; Greek Thesmophoriazousai) Euripides has discovered that the women of Athens, angered by his constant attacks upon them in his tragedies, mean to discuss during their coming festival (the Thesmophoria) the question of contriving his death. Euripides tries to persuade the effeminate Agathon, a tragic poet, to plead his cause. Agathon refuses, and Euripides persuades his brother-in-law Mnesilochus to undertake the assignment. Mnesilochus is disguised with great thoroughness as a woman and sent on his mission, but his true sex is discovered and he is at once seized by the women. There follow three scenes in which he tries unsuccessfully to escape; all three involve brilliant parodies of Euripides' tragedies, and all three attempts fail. Finally, Euripides himself arrives and succeeds in rescuing his advocate by promising never again to revile women.

Frogs

      This is a literary comedy. In Frogs (405 BC; Greek Batrachoi) Dionysus, the god of drama, is concerned about the poor quality of present-day tragedy in Athens now that his recent favourite, Euripides, is dead. Dionysus disguises himself as the hero Heracles and goes down to Hades to bring Euripides back to the land of the living. As the result, however, of a competition arranged between Euripides and his great predecessor, Aeschylus, Dionysus is won over to the latter's cause and returns to earth with Aeschylus, instead, as the one more likely to help Athens in its troubles.

Women at the Ecclesia

      In Women at the Ecclesia (c. 392 BC; Greek Ekklēsiazousai) the women of Athens dress up as men, take over the Ecclesia (the Athenian democratic assembly), and introduce a communistic system of wealth, sex, and property. It is not one of Aristophanes' more appealing plays.

Wealth

      The last of the author's plays to be performed in his lifetime, Wealth (388 BC; Greek Ploutos) is a somewhat moralizing work and does not enhance his reputation—though, as suggested, it may have inaugurated the Middle Comedy.

      Shortly after producing his Wealth, Aristophanes died, leaving two plays (now lost), the Aiolosikon and the Kokolos, which his son staged c. 387 BC; both of them are generally assumed to have been mythological burlesques.

Additional Reading

Critical studies on the works of Aristophanes include Gilbert Murray, Aristophanes: A Study (1933, reprinted 1965), still lively; Carlo Ferdinando Russo, Aristophanes: An Author for the Stage (1994; originally published in Italian, 1962); K.J. Dover, Aristophanic Comedy (1972); Rosemary M. Harriott, Aristophanes: Poet & Dramatist (1986); Cedric H. Whitman, Aristophanes and the Comic Hero (1964, reissued 1971); Kenneth McLeish, The Theatre of Aristophanes (1980), on the mechanics of raising laughs; and Jeffrey Henderson (ed.), Aristophanes: Essays in Interpretation (1980). Other general treatments are Carroll Moulton, Aristophanic Poetry (1981); Kenneth J. Reckford, Aristophanes' Old-and-New Comedy (1987); Douglas M. MacDowell, Aristophanes and Athens: An Introduction to the Plays (1995); L.P.E. Parker, The Songs of Aristophanes (1997); and M.S. Silk, Aristophanes and the Definition of Comedy (2000);Books on more specific topics include Laura M. Stone, Costume in Aristophanic Poetry (1981); Thomas K. Hubbard, The Mask of Comedy: Aristophanes and the Intertextual Parabasis (1991); A.M. Bowie, Aristophanes: Myth, Ritual, and Comedy (1993); Jeffrey Henderson, The Maculate Muse: Obscene Language in Attic Comedy, 2nd ed. (1991); and James Robson, Humour, Obscenity, and Aristophanes (2006).Maurice Platnauer Oliver Taplin Ed.

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