Aristophanes

Aristophanes was an Athenian comic poet of the late fifth and early fourth centuries BC. Eleven of his comedies survive complete: Acharnians, Knights, Clouds, Wasps, Peace, Birds, Lysistrata, Women at the Thesmophoria, Frogs, Assemblywomen and Wealth. They are the only complete examples of Old Comedy that we have, and the many lost plays by him and by his rivals survive only in fragments. In Plato’s Symposium he is one of the guests at Agathon’s party, and his speech about love is one of the speeches of the evening (Plato, Symposium 176b, 189c–193d). In the plays themselves he describes his own career: how he first had his comedies produced by others (Aristophanes, Clouds 528–533), how he attacked the politician Cleon (Acharnians 377–382, Wasps 1029–1037) and how he claimed to teach the Athenians what is best for them (Acharnians 633–658). Plutarch, in an essay that compares him with Menander, prefers Menander and calls Aristophanes’ humor coarse (Plutarch, Comparison of Aristophanes and Menander, sections 1–4). In Peace the chorus calls its own poet the best and most famous teacher of comedy among men (Peace 736–738) and asks the audience to support him in the competition (Peace 765–773).

Aristophanes’ Life and Works

Life

According to the ancient Lives of Aristophanes, the poet was the son of Philippus and belonged to the deme of Cydathenaeum in Athens. No ancient source gives the year of his birth. The ancient notices on his plays place his first comedy, The Banqueters, in 427 BC, and his second, The Babylonians, in 426 BC at the City Dionysia. Neither survives. The notices also say that his early plays were produced not in his own name but by a friend, Callistratus, and that other plays, including the Frogs, were produced by Philonides. The poet confirms the practice in the Clouds, where he says that his earlier comedies were like a girl who could not yet give birth, and that another girl took up and raised the child (Clouds 530–533). In the Knights the chorus gives the poet’s explanation: he did not ask for a chorus of his own earlier because he thought comedy the most difficult work of all, and because a man should first be an oarsman, then serve at the prow and watch the winds, and only then steer his own ship (Knights 512–544). In the Wasps he says that he first helped other poets in secret, “entering other men’s bellies” like the prophet Eurycles, and then competed openly in his own name (Wasps 1018–1022).

Aristophanes’ early plays also brought him into conflict with Cleon, the leading politician of the day. In the Acharnians, produced the year after the Babylonians, a character speaks for the poet: “I know what I suffered at the hands of Cleon because of last year’s comedy. He dragged me into the council chamber and slandered me” (Acharnians 377–382). Later in the play he says that Cleon cannot slander him this time for speaking ill of the city before foreigners, because the Lenaea is an occasion for citizens only (Acharnians 502–508), and the chorus says that the poet has been slandered by his enemies as one who mocks the city and insults the people (Acharnians 630–632). The poet did not back down. According to the notices on the plays, the Knights of 424 BC was the first play produced in his own name, and it was aimed at Cleon; the Clouds says that he struck Cleon, “a very great man,” in the belly, and did not dare to jump on him when he was down (Clouds 549–550). In the Wasps (422 BC) and Peace (421 BC) he looks back at his fight with the monster with a hundred heads of flatterers around its head (Wasps 1029–1037, Peace 754–759). Cleon was killed at Amphipolis in 422 BC (Thucydides 5.10.9).

The Clouds of 423 BC, a comedy about Socrates and the sophists, did not win. In the version we now read, the poet says that he considered it the most skilful of his comedies, that he offered it to the audience first, and that he went away defeated by vulgar men when he did not deserve it (Clouds 520–527). The ancient notices say it came third. The play had a long afterlife: Plato’s Socrates, in his defense, says that the jurors had seen Socrates in the comedy of Aristophanes being carried about and saying that he walked on air (Plato, Apology 19c). Because the text we read speaks of the defeat in its parabasis (Clouds 520–527), it must be a revision of the play that was first performed.

The ancient notices record the later plays in the following order: Birds (414 BC), Lysistrata and Women at the Thesmophoria (411 BC), and Frogs (405 BC). The synopsis of the Frogs says that it won first prize and was performed a second time because its parabasis was so admired, and the ancient Life adds that the poet was crowned with a wreath of the sacred olive for the advice given in it. The Frogs also shows the poet as an adviser to the city. In its parabasis the chorus urges the Athenians to give back full rights to citizens who had been disenfranchised and to treat all those who fought together at sea as fellow citizens (Frogs 686–705), and complains that the city prefers new bad coins to the old good ones, as it prefers base citizens to the well-born (Frogs 718–737). Aristophanes’ last plays were Assemblywomen (about 391 BC) and Wealth (388 BC), the last play produced in his own name. The ancient Life says that his last two plays, Cocalus and Aeolosicon, were produced by his son Araros, and that Araros and another son, Philippus, were also comic poets. No ancient source gives the date of his death.

Plays

The ancient Life ascribes 44 comedies to Aristophanes; four of them (Dionysus Shipwrecked, Dramas or Niobus, Islands and Poesy) were doubted even in antiquity. Eleven plays survive complete; these are the dates that the ancient notices give: Acharnians (425 BC), Knights (424), Clouds (423, revised), Wasps (422), Peace (421), Birds (414), Lysistrata (411), Women at the Thesmophoria (411), Frogs (405), Assemblywomen (about 391) and Wealth (388). The Wealth that we have is the second version; the ancient notices say that an earlier Wealth was produced in 408 BC.

In brief, the surviving plays are these. In the Acharnians, the farmer Dicaeopolis makes a private peace with Sparta for himself and trades with its neighbors while the city goes on with the war (Acharnians 130–203). In the Knights, the slaves of Demos, the Athenian people, are bullied by a Paphlagonian slave, who represents Cleon (compare Clouds 549–550), until a sausage-seller beats him at flattery. In the Clouds, the debtor Strepsiades sends himself, and then his son, to Socrates’ school, and at the end sets fire to it (Clouds 1484–1492). In the Wasps, the son tries to cure his old father of his passion for sitting on juries. In Peace, Trygaeus rides a dung-beetle to heaven to bring back the goddess Peace (Peace 82–84). In the Birds, two Athenians persuade the birds to found a city in the air, Cloudcuckooland (Birds 819–821). In Lysistrata, the women of Greece seize the Acropolis and refuse their husbands in order to end the war. In Women at the Thesmophoria, the poet Euripides sends a relative in disguise to the women’s festival to defend him (see the article on that play). In the Frogs, Dionysus goes down to the Underworld to bring back a tragic poet, and judges the contest between Aeschylus and Euripides (see the article on that play). In Assemblywomen, the women disguise themselves as men and take over the Assembly. In Wealth, the farmer Chremylus brings the blind god of wealth to be cured so that the good may prosper.

The plays themselves name many of his rivals. In the Knights the chorus speaks of the earlier poets Magnes, Cratinus and Crates (Knights 520–540), and in the revised Clouds the poet complains that Eupolis, Phrynichus and Hermippus took up his jokes about the demagogue Hyperbolus (Clouds 551–559).

Legacy

Aristophanes made large claims for his own art. In the Acharnians the chorus says that the poet has stopped the Athenians from being deceived by the flattery of foreign envoys and that he dared to say what is right, so that the allies will come to see him, and even the king of Sparta has asked which side the poet abuses, because the side he abuses is the better (Acharnians 633–658). In the Peace the chorus says that he stopped his rivals from always mocking rags and lice, drove off the cheap comic Heracles figures and the beaten slaves, and built up a great art with grand words and thoughts (Peace 739–752). In the Clouds he says that his comedy is modest: it brings no red leather phallus for the children to laugh at, does not mock bald men, does not drag in a cordax dance, and does not bring torches onto the stage (Clouds 537–544).

The same self-portrait appears in the Wasps and Peace. In the Wasps the chorus says that the poet, once he had become great and honored, did not let it go to his head, did not chase boys in the wrestling-schools, and did not give in to any lover who wanted his boy mocked in a comedy, because he did not want to make the Muses into go-betweens (Wasps 1023–1028). When he first began to produce plays, it continues, he did not attack ordinary men but, with the anger of Heracles, went straight for the greatest monster of all, the jagged-toothed one with the eyes of Cynna and the voice of a torrent, and he fought him on the people’s behalf (Wasps 1029–1037). The poet then says in the Peace that he did not wander the wrestling-schools seducing boys either, but packed up his equipment and went home, having upset few and pleased many (Peace 762–764), and the chorus calls on men and boys, and even the bald, to support him in the contest (Peace 765–773). These passages are the poet speaking about himself, and they show how he wished to be seen; they are not independent evidence of what he did.

He was also a parodist of tragedy. In the Acharnians the hero, Dicaeopolis, visits Euripides at his house to borrow a beggar’s rags from one of his tragedies (Acharnians 393–479), and the poet calls his own art “trugedy” (Acharnians 499–500). Euripides is a character in three surviving plays: the Acharnians, the Women at the Thesmophoria and the Frogs, where Euripides and Aeschylus compete in the Underworld. The Thesmophoria is full of recreations of scenes from Euripides’ tragedies in a comic setting.

The plays that survive are all examples of Old Comedy, and they share a loose pattern that can be seen in the Greek. A prologue explains the situation and the hero’s plan; the chorus enters in the parodos; a debate, the agon, usually follows; in the parabasis the chorus steps forward and speaks to the audience on behalf of the poet, as in Acharnians 626–718, Knights 498–610, Clouds 510–626, Wasps 1009–1121 and Peace 729–818; a series of episodes shows the consequences of the hero’s plan; and the play ends with an exodos in which the chorus leaves the stage in celebration. The later plays are less regular. The chorus has a much smaller part in Assemblywomen and Wealth, and these two plays have no parabasis.

The ancients thought highly of Aristophanes, even though Plutarch preferred Menander (Plutarch, Comparison of Aristophanes and Menander, sections 1–4). An epigram that the ancient Life attributes to Plato says: “The Graces, looking for a shrine that would never fall, found the soul of Aristophanes.”

Chronology of Aristophanes’ Life

The dates in this list are those recorded in the ancient notices on the plays (the hypotheses), the ancient commentators (scholia) and the ancient Life; where none of them gives a festival or a prize, none is listed.

427 – The Banqueters (lost), produced by Callistratus
426 – The Babylonians (lost) at the City Dionysia; Cleon takes offence (see Acharnians 377–382, 502–508)
425 – The Acharnians at the Lenaea, produced by Callistratus, first prize
424 – The Knights at the Lenaea, first prize, the first play produced in his own name
423 – The Clouds at the City Dionysia, third place; later revised
422 – The Wasps at the Lenaea; Cleon dies at Amphipolis (Thucydides 5.10.9)
421 – Peace at the City Dionysia, second prize
414 – Amphiaraus (lost) at the Lenaea, produced by Philonides; The Birds at the City Dionysia, second prize
411 – Lysistrata, produced by Callistratus; Women at the Thesmophoria
408 – the first version of Wealth
405 – The Frogs, produced by Philonides, first prize at the Lenaea; performed a second time
about 391 – Assemblywomen
388 – Wealth, the second version, the last play produced in his own name
after 388 – Cocalus and Aeolosicon (both lost), produced by his son Araros

Sources

Aristophanes, Acharnians, Knights, Clouds, Wasps and Peace (the passages cited above, in the Greek text); Plato, Apology 19c and Symposium 176b, 185c–193d; Plutarch, Comparison of Aristophanes and Menander; Thucydides 5.10.9 for the death of Cleon; the ancient Life of Aristophanes, the ancient notices on the plays (hypotheses) and the scholia, for the production dates, prizes and producers.