Aristophanes

• 1. Introduction

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  Aristophanes wrote forty plays, yet only eleven survive virtually complete. They are the only full-length examples of Old Comedy to reach us from antiquity. This Ancient Greek comic playwright from Athens earned the titles "The Father of Comedy" and "the Prince of Ancient Comedy." His powers of ridicule were feared by influential contemporaries. Plato singled out his play The Clouds as slander that helped condemn Socrates to death. But who was the man behind these preposterous plots and explicit jokes? Why do scholars say he recreated the life of ancient Athens more convincingly than any other author? And why, when so little of his life is recorded, do we read his comedies as windows onto a vanished city? The answers begin with the festivals where his plays first won their prizes.

• 2. The Festival Stage

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  The Theatre of Dionysus seated at least 10,000 people. Aristophanes's plays were performed there at the City Dionysia and the Lenaia, the great religious festivals of Athens, where they competed for prizes against other comic dramatists. At the City Dionysia, an elaborate series of lotteries reduced the voting judges to just five, a design meant to prevent prejudice and corruption. The day's program at that festival was crowded. Three tragedies and a satyr play came ahead of a comedy. The Chorus was essential to a play's success, recruited and funded by a choregus. This choregus was a wealthy citizen appointed to the task by one of the archons. He could treat his expenditure on the Chorus as a civic duty and a public honour. Aristophanes won second prize at the City Dionysia in 427 BC with his first play The Banqueters. He won first prize there with his next play, The Babylonians. He was also victorious at least three times at the Lenaia, with The Acharnians in 425, Knights in 424, and Frogs in 405. Frogs won the unique distinction of a repeat performance at a subsequent festival.

• 3. Feared By Cleon

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  Cleon denounced The Babylonians as a slander against the Athenian polis. The play, now lost, had depicted the cities of the Delian League as slaves grinding at a mill, an embarrassment to Athenian authorities since foreign dignitaries usually attended the City Dionysia. Some influential citizens, Cleon among them, possibly took legal action against the author. The details of the trial are unrecorded. Speaking through the hero of his third play The Acharnians, staged at the Lenaia where there were few or no foreign dignitaries, the poet carefully distinguished the polis from the real targets of his wit. The Knights was the first of many plays Aristophanes directed himself, and it was full of anti-Cleon jokes. Through that play's Chorus he declared, "In my opinion, the author-director of comedies has the hardest job of all." His satirical diatribes appear to have had no effect on Cleon's political career. A few weeks after the performance of The Knights, Cleon was elected to the prestigious board of ten generals. The caricatures of him continued up to and even beyond his death.

• 4. A Conservative Voice?

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  Aristophanes consistently espoused opposition to radical new influences in Athenian society, even as he boasted of his own originality as a dramatist. He caricatured leading figures in the arts, especially Euripides, whose influence on his own work he once grudgingly acknowledged. In politics he targeted the populist Cleon, and in philosophy and religion Socrates was his most obvious target. These caricatures seem to imply an old-fashioned conservative, yet that view leads to contradictions. The conservatism may instead reflect his audience. Many of the poorer citizens, typically the main supporters of demagogues like Cleon, may have spent the festival holiday on other pursuits, leaving an unrepresentative crowd. The production process points the same way. Aristophanes showed in The Knights that wealthy citizens might regard civic responsibilities as punishment imposed on them by populists. Since all dramatists depended on the generosity of the wealthiest section of Athenian society, the plays may simply voice that group. When his first play The Banqueters was produced, Athens was an ambitious imperial power and the Peloponnesian War was only in its fourth year. His plays express pride in the older generation, the victors at Marathon, yet they are staunchly opposed to the war with Sparta and scathing toward its profiteers.

• 5. A Life In Fragments

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  Philippus was his father and Zenodora his mother. Aristophanes was an Athenian citizen from the deme of Kydathenaion, part of the Attic tribe of Pandionis, and his family was assumed in antiquity to have connections with the island of Aegina. Beyond these few facts, little is known about his life, and his plays are the main source of biographical information. The convention of Old Comedy let the chorus speak on behalf of the author in an address called the parabasis, where some biographical facts appear. These facts relate almost entirely to his career as a dramatist. Comments in The Clouds suggest he can hardly have been more than 18 years old when The Banqueters was produced. Statements in The Clouds and Peace have been read as evidence that he was prematurely bald. His use of directors complicates this reliance on the plays. His first three plays were directed not by him but by Callistratus and Philoneides, an arrangement that seemed to suit him since he used the same directors in many later plays. Philoneides later directed The Frogs. An apparent self-reference might therefore point to a director instead. Aristophanes survived the Peloponnesian War, two oligarchic revolutions and two democratic restorations. He was probably appointed to the Council of Five Hundred for a year at the beginning of the fourth century.

• 6. Sons And Successors

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  Araros, a son of Aristophanes, was also a comic poet. He could have been heavily involved in producing his father's play Wealth II in 388. Araros is also thought to have staged the posthumous performances of the now lost plays Aeolosicon II and Cocalus, and the last of these possibly won the prize at the City Dionysia in 387. A second son, Philippus, was twice victorious at the Lenaia and could have directed some of Eubulus's comedies. A third son was called either Nicostratus or Philetaerus. A man by the latter name appears in the catalogue of Lenaia victors with two victories, the first probably in the late 370s. The career of Aristophanes itself spanned a transformation of his city. By the time his last play was produced, around 386 BC, Athens had been defeated in war and its empire dismantled. It had changed from the political to the intellectual centre of Greece. His own work evolved with it, from Old Comedy until, in his last surviving play Wealth II, it more closely resembled New Comedy.

• 7. The Comic Machinery

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  Fantasy in Old Comedy is unrestricted, and impossibilities are ignored. Situations develop logically to absurd conclusions, an approach echoed later in the works of Lewis Carroll and Eugène Ionesco. The crazy costume worn by Dionysus in The Frogs is typical. He wears a woman's saffron-coloured tunic because effeminacy is an aspect of his divinity, buskin boots because he is interested in reviving tragedy, and a lion skin cape because, like Heracles, his mission leads him into Hades. The Aristophanic hero is independent-minded and self-reliant, with something of the ingenuity of Homer's Odysseus and the shrewdness of the farmer idealized in Hesiod's Works and Days. Dikaiopolis in The Acharnians contrives a private peace treaty with the Spartans. Bdelucleon in The Wasps turns his own house into a private law court to keep his jury-addicted father at home. Trygaeus in Peace flies to Olympus on a giant dung beetle to obtain an end to the Peloponnesian War. Pisthetairus in Birds sets off to found a colony and becomes ruler of the bird kingdom. The numerous surprises were managed with only three principal actors. A fourth, often the leader of the chorus, was permitted to deliver short speeches. Imagery may be the most important feature of the language. In The Knights the ears of a character with selective hearing are represented as parasols that open and close.

• 8. The Long Afterlife

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  Sophocles and Euripides died near the end of the Peloponnesian War, and the art of tragedy thereafter ceased to develop. Comedy continued to evolve after the defeat of Athens, perhaps because in Aristophanes it had a master craftsman who lived long enough to usher it into a new age. The orator Quintilian believed the charm and grandeur of the Attic dialect made Old Comedy a model for orators to study, inferior only to the works of Homer. A revival of interest in the Attic dialect may explain the recovery and circulation of his plays during the fourth and fifth centuries AD, the reason they survive today. The Clouds was awarded third, or last, place after its original performance, and the surviving text is a later draft he intended to be read rather than acted. Latin translations by Andreas Divus, published in Venice in 1528, circulated widely throughout Renaissance Europe. Racine drew Les Plaideurs in 1668 from The Wasps. Goethe adapted a short play, Die Vögel, from The Birds for performance in Weimar. The plays have appealed to opposite sides. Anatoly Lunacharsky, first Commissar of Enlightenment for the USSR in 1917, declared the ancient dramatist would have a permanent place in proletarian theatre. In 1959 the stage-director Karolos Koun directed a version of The Birds under the Acropolis, breaking taboos through the voice of Aristophanes.