Aristophanes

Eleven of his forty plays are read and performed today. However, historians have divided the work of Aristophanes into three periods. The first period ended about 421 B.C. and included two of his lost plays as well as five of the surviving ones. For some reason Aristophanes' first three plays were brought out under the name of one of his actors. They included the two lost plays, The Banqueters and The Babylonians, and the prize-winning “Acharnians.” “The Knights”, which won first prize in 424 B.C., was brought out under the author's own name. It contained a sharp attack on the current ruler Cleon, and, because no actor was willing to incur the enmity of so powerful a person, Aristophanes had to play the part of Cleon himself. “The Clouds” (423 B.C.) contains the famous dialogue scene between the Just and the Unjust argument, bitterly spiting Sophocles. “The Wasps” (422 B.C.) ridiculed the regular courts of justice. “The Peace” (421 B.C.) was written in the interests of the recently concluded peace between Athens and Sparta. During the seven years that passed before Aristophanes exhibited another play, a law had been passed to restrict political satire. In the second group, beginning with “The Birds” (414 B.C.) he turned to social satire and ridiculed the Athenians’ fondness for litigation. “Lysistrata” (411 B.C.) represents a woman's efforts to bring about peace, while “Thesmophoriazusae” of the same year contains an attack on Euripides. “The Frogs”, which started the third period in 405 B.C., was devoted to literary and dramatic criticism. “Ecclesiazusae” (Women in Parliament) (392 B.C.) was a satire on communistic ideas of the time. The local character of the plays of the first period had by the third period given way to an internationalism that marks Aristophanes as the transition-link between what is termed “Old Comedy,” “Middle,” and “New Comedy” of Greece.

Shortly after producing “The Plutus” in 388 BC, Aristophanes died. His son, Araros, staged two more of his plays in about 387 BC. Modern critics of Aristophanes’ works have centered their views on the loose construction of plots and the feeble development of characters. However, the construction of satires is hardly ever accommodating to formal literature standards.

Aristophanes’ Plays (timeline)

 Acharnians - 425 BC

 Knights - 424 BC

 Clouds - 423 BC

 Wasps - 422 BC

 Peace - 421 BC

 Birds - 414 BC

 Lysistrata - 411 BC

 Women at the Thesmophoria - 411 BC

 Frogs - 405 BC

 Women at the Ecclesia - 392 BC

 Wealth (also known as The Plutus) - 388 BC

1) The era-- about the people, the food, the housing, the socail habbits etc,. What kind of people went to the theare in this time.

2) Performance style-- When originally performed, what types of costumes , sets, props, lighting and sound were used?

AristophanesBorn: c. 450 BC Died: c. 388 BC Cause of death: unspecified

Gender: Male Race or Ethnicity: White Sexual orientation: Straight Occupation: Playwright

Nationality: Ancient Greece Executive summary: Lysistrata, The Frogs

The great comic dramatist and poet of Athens. His birth year is uncertain. He is known to have been about the same age as Eupolis, and is said to have been "almost a boy" when his first comedy (The Banqueters) was brought out in 427 BC. His father Philippus was a landowner in Aegina. Aristophanes was an Athenian citizen of the tribe Pandionis, and the deme Cydathene. The stories which made him a native of Camirus in Rhodes; or of the Egyptian Naucratis, had probably no other foundation than an indictment for usurpation of civic rights which appears to have been more than once laid against him by Cleon. His three sons -- Philippus, Araros and Nicostratus -- were all comic poets. Philippus, the eldest, was a rival of Eubulus, who began to exhibit in 376 BC. Araros brought out two of his father's latest comedies -- the Cocalus and the Aeolosicon, and in 375 began to exhibit works of his own. Nicostratus, the youngest, is assigned by Athenaeus to the Middle Comedy, but belongs, as is shown by some of the names and characters of his pieces, to the New Comedy also.

Although tragedy and comedy had their common origin in the festivals of Dionysus, the regular establishment of tragedy at Athens preceded by half a century that of comedy. The Old Comedy may be said to have lasted about eighty years (470-390 BC), and to have flourished about fifty-six (460-404 BC). Of the forty poets who are named as having illustrated it the chief were Cratinus, Eupolis and Aristophanes. The Middle Comedy covers a period of about seventy years (390-320 BC), its chief poets being Antiphanes, Alexis, Theopompus and Strattis. The New Comedy was in vigor for about seventy years (320-250 BC), having for its foremost representatives Menander, Philemon and Diphilus. The Old Comedy was possible only for a thorough democracy. Its essence was a satirical censorship, unsparing in personalities, of public and of private life -- of morality, of statesmanship, of education, of literature, of social usage -- in a word, of everything which had an interest for the city or which could amuse the citizens. Preserving all the freedom of banter and of riotous fun to which its origin gave it an historical right, it aimed at associating with this a strong practical purpose -- the expression of a democratic public opinion in such a form that no misconduct or folly could altogether disregard it. That licentiousness, that grossness of allusion which too often disfigures it, was, it should be remembered, exacted by the sentiment of the Dionysiac festivals, as much as a decorous cheerfulness is expected at the holiday times of other worships. This was the popular element. Without this the entertainment would have been found flat and unseasonable. But for a comic poet of the higher calibre the consciousness of a recognized power which he could exert, and the desire to use this power for the good of the city, must always have been the uppermost feelings. At Athens the poet of the Old Comedy had an influence analogous, perhaps, rather to that of the journalist than to that of the modern dramatist. But the established type of Dionysiac comedy gave him an instrument such as no public satirist has ever wielded. When Molière wished to brand hypocrisy he could only make his Tartuffe the central figure of a regular drama, developed by a regular process to a just catastrophe. He had no choice between touching too lightly and using sustained force to make a profound impression. The Athenian dramatist of the Old Comedy worked under no such limitations of form. The wildest flights of extravagance were permitted to him. Nothing bound him to a dangerous emphasis or a wearisome insistence. He could deal the keenest thrust, or make the most earnest appeal, and at the next moment -- if his instinct told him that it was time to change the subject -- vary the serious strain by burlesque. He had, in short, an incomparable scope for trenchant satire directed by sure tact.

Aristophanes is for us the representative of the Old Comedy. But his genius, while it includes, also transcends the genius of the Old Comedy. He can denounce the frauds of a Cleon, he can vindicate the duty of Athens to herself and to her allies, with a stinging scorn and a force of patriotic indignation which makes the poet almost forgotten in the citizen. He can banter Euripides with an ingenuity of light mockery which makes it seem for the time as if the leading Aristophanic trait was the art of seeing all things from their prosaic side. Yet it is neither in the denunciation nor in the mockery that he is most individual. His truest and highest faculty is revealed by those wonderful bits of lyric writing in which he soars above everything that can move laughter or tears, and makes the clear air thrill with the notes of a song as free, as musical and as wild as that of the nightingale invoked by his own chorus in the Birds. The speech of Dikaios Logos in the Clouds, the praises of country life in the Peace, the serenade in the Ecclesiazusae, the songs of the Spartan and Athenian maidens in the Lysistrata, above all, perhaps, the chorus in the Frogs, the beautiful chant of the Initiated -- these passages, and such as these, are the true glories of Aristophanes. They are the strains, not of an artist, but of one who warbles for pure gladness of heart in some place made bright by the presence of a god. Nothing else in Greek poetry has quite this wild sweetness of the woods. Of modern poets Shakespeare alone, perhaps, has it in combination with a like richness and fertility of fancy.

Fifty-four comedies were ascribed to Aristophanes. Forty-three of these are allowed as genuine by Bergk. Eleven only are extant. These eleven form a running commentary on the outer and the inner life of Athens during thirty-six years. They may be ranged under three periods. The first, extending to 420 BC, includes those plays in which Aristophanes uses an absolutely unrestrained freedom of political satire. The second ends with the year 405. Its productions are distinguished from those of the earlier time by a certain degree of reticence and caution. The third period, down to 388 BC, comprises two plays in which the transition to the character of the Middle Comedy is well marked, not merely by disuse of the parabasis, but by general self-restraint.

I. First Period. (1) 425 BC. The Acharnians. Since the defeat in Boeotia the peace party at Athens had gained ground, and in this play Aristophanes seeks to strengthen their hands. Dicaeopolis, an honest countryman, is determined to make peace with Sparta on his own account, not deterred by the angry men of Acharnae, who crave vengeance for the devastation of their vineyards. He sends to Sparta for samples of peace; and he is so much pleased with the flavor of the Thirty Years' sample that he at once concludes a treaty for himself and his family. All the blessings of life descend on him; while Lamachus, the leader of the war party, is smarting from cold, snow and wounds.

(2) 424 BC. The Knights. Three years before, in his Babylonians, Aristophanes had assailed Cleon as the typical demagogue. In this play he continues the attack. The Demos, or State, is represented by an old man who has put himself and his household into the hands of a rascally Paphlagonian steward. Nicias and Demosthenes, slaves of Demos, contrive that the Paphlagonian shall be supplanted in their master's favor by a sausage-seller. No sooner has Demos been thus rescued than his youthfulness and his good sense return together.

(3) 423 BC. The Clouds (the first edition; a second edition was brought out in 422 BC). This play would be correctly described as an attack on the new spirit of intellectual inquiry and culture rather than on a school or class. Two classes of thinkers or teachers are, however, specially satirized under the general name of "Sophist." 1. The Physical Philosophers -- indicated by allusions to the doctrines of Anaxagoras, Heraclitus and Diogenes of Apollonia. 2. The professed teachers of rhetoric, belles lettres, etc., such as Protagoras and Prodicus. Socrates is taken as the type of the entire tendency. A youth named Pheidippides -- obviously meant for Alcibiades is sent by his father to Socrates to be cured of his dissolute propensities. Under the discipline of Socrates the youth becomes accomplished in dishonesty and impiety. The conclusion of the play shows the indignant father preparing to burn up the philosopher and his hall of contemplation.

(4) 422 BC. The Wasps. This comedy, which suggested Les Plaideurs to Racine, is a satire on the Athenian love of litigation. The strength of demagogy, while it lay chiefly in the ecclesia, lay partly also in the paid dicasteries. From this point of view the Wasps may be regarded as supplementing the Knights. Philocleon (admirer of Cleon), an old man, has a passion for lawsuits -- a passion which his son, Bdelycleon (detester of Cleon) fails to check, until he hits upon the device of turning the house into a law court, and paying his father for absence from the public suits. The house dog steals a Sicilian cheese; the old man is enabled to gratify his taste by trying the case, and, by an oversight, acquits the defendant. In the second half of the play a change comes over the dream of Philocleon; from litigation he turns to literature and music, and is congratulated by the chorus on his happy conversion.

(5) 421 BC. The Peace. In its advocacy of peace with Sparta, this play, acted at the Great Dionysia shortly before the conclusion of the treaty, continues the purpose of the Acharnians. Trygaeus, a distressed Athenian, soars to the sky on a beetle's back. There he finds the gods engaged in pounding the Greek states in a mortar. In order to stop this, he frees the goddess Peace from a well in which she is imprisoned. The pestle and mortar are laid aside by the gods, and Trygaeus marries one of the handmaids of Peace.

II. Second Period. (6) 414 BC. The Birds. Peisthetaerus, an enterprising Athenian, and his friend Euelpides persuade the birds to build a city -- "Cloud-Cuckoo-borough" -- in mid-air, so as to cut off the gods from men. The plan succeeds; the gods send envoys to treat with the birds; and Peisthetaerus marries Basileia, daughter of Zeus. Some have found in the Birds a complete historical allegory of the Sicilian expedition; others, a general satire on the prevalence at Athens of headstrong caprice over law and order; others, merely an aspiration towards a new and purified Athens -- a dream to which the poet had turned from his hope for a revival of the Athens of the past. In another view, the piece is mainly a protest against the religious fanaticism which the incident of the Hermae had called forth.

(7) 411 BC. The Lysistrata. This play was brought out during the earlier stages of those intrigues which led to the revolution of the Four Hundred. It appeared shortly before Peisander had arrived in Athens from the camp at Samos for the purpose of organizing the oligarchic policy. The Lysistrata expresses the popular desire for peace at any cost. As the men can do nothing, the women take the question into their own hands, occupy the citadel, and bring the citizens to surrender.

(8) 411 BC. The Thesmophoriazusae (Priestesses of Demeter). This came out three months later than the Lysistrata, during the reign of terror established by the oligarchic conspirators, but before their blow had been struck. The political meaning of the play lies in the absence of political allusion. Fear silences even comedy. Only women and Euripides are satirized. Euripides is accused and condemned at the female festival of the Thesmophoria.

(9) 405 BC. The Frogs. This piece was brought out just when Athens had made her last effort in the Peloponnesian War, eight months before the battle of Aegospotami, and about fifteen months before the taking of Athens by Lysander. It may be considered as an attempt to distract men's minds from public affairs. It is a literary criticism. Aeschylus and Euripides were both lately dead. Athens is beggared of poets; and Dionysus goes down to Hades to bring back a poet. Aeschylus and Euripides contend in the under-world for the throne of tragedy; and the victory is at last awarded to Aeschylus.

III. Third Period. (10) 393 BC. The Ecclesiazusae (women in parliament). The women, disguised as men, steal into the ecclesia, and succeed in decreeing a new constitution. At this time the demagogue Agyrrhius led the assembly; and the play is, in fact, a satire on the general demoralization of public life.

(11) 388 BC. The Plutus (Wealth). The first edition of the play had appeared in 408 BC, being a symbolical representation of the fact that the victories won by Alcibiades in the Hellespont had brought back the god of wealth to the treasure chamber of the Parthenon. In its extant form the Plutus is simply a moral allegory. Chremylus, a worthy but poor man, falls in with a blind and aged wanderer, who proves to be the god of wealth. Asclepius restores eyesight to Plutus; whereupon all the just are made rich and all the unjust are reduced to poverty.

Among the lost plays, the following are the chief of which anything is known:

1. 427 BC. The Banqueters. A satire on young Athens. A father has two sons; one is brought up in the good old school, another in the tricky subtleties of the new; and the contrast of results is the chief theme.

2. 426 BC. The Babylonians. Under this name the subject-allies of Athens are represented as "Babylonians" -- barbarian slaves, employed to grind in the mill. The oppression of the allies by the demagogues -- a topic often touched elsewhere -- was, then, the main subject of the piece, in which Aristophanes is said to have attacked especially the system of appointing to offices by lot. The comedy is memorable as opening that Aristophanic war upon Cleon which was continued in the Knights and the Wasps.

The Merchantmen, The Farmers, The Preliminary Contest (Proagon), and possibly the Old Age (Geras), belonged to the First Period. The Geras is assigned by Süvern to 422 BC, and is supposed to have been a picture of dotage similar to that in the Knights. A comedy called The Islands is conjectured to have dealt with the sufferings imposed by the war on the insular tributaries. The Triphales was probably a satire on Alcibiades; the Storks, on the tragic poet Patrocles.

In the Aeolosicon -- produced by his son Araros in 387 BC, Aristophanes probably parodied the Aeolus of Euripides. The Cocalus is thought to have been a parody of the legend, according to which a Sicilian king of that name slew Minos.

A sympathetic reader of Aristophanes can hardly fail to perceive that, while his political and intellectual tendencies are well marked, his opinions, in so far as they color his comedies, are too indefinite to reward, or indeed to tolerate, analysis. Aristophanes was a natural conservative. His ideal was the Athens of the Persian wars. He disapproved the policy which had made Athenian empire irksome to the allies and formidable to Greece; he detested the vulgarity and the violence of mob rule; he clave to the old worship of the gods; he regarded the new ideas of education as a tissue of imposture and impiety. How far he was from clearness or precision of view in regard to the intellectual revolution which was going forward, appears from the Clouds, in which thinkers and literary workers who had absolutely nothing in common are treated with sweeping ridicule as prophets of a common heresy. Aristophanes is one of the men for whom opinion is mainly a matter of feeling, not of reason. His imaginative susceptibility gave him a warm and loyal love for the traditional glories of Athens, however dim the past to which they belonged; a horror of what was ugly or ignoble in the present; a keen perception of what was offensive or absurd in pretension. The broad preferences and dislikes thus generated were enough not only to point the moral of comedy, but to make hint, in many cases, a really useful censor for the city. The service which he could render in this way was, however, only negative. He could hardly be, in any positive sense, a political or a moral teacher for Athens. His rooted antipathy to intellectual progress, while it affords easy and wide scope for his wit, must after all, lower his intellectual rank. The great minds are not the enemies of ideas. But as a mocker -- to use the word which seems most closely to describe him on this side -- he is incomparable for the union of subtlety with riot of the comic imagination. As a poet, he is immortal. And, among Athenian poets, he has it for his distinctive characteristic that he is inspired less by that Greek genius which never allows fancy to escape from the control of defining, though spiritualizing, reason, than by such ethereal rapture of the unfettered fancy as lifts Shakespeare or Shelley above it, "Pouring his full heart / In profuse strains of unpremeditated art."

Father: Philippus

Wrote plays: The Acharnians (425 BC) The Knights (424 BC The Clouds (423 BC) The Wasps (422 BC) Peace (421 BC) The Birds (414 BC) Lysistrata (411 BC) Thesmophoriazousae (410 BC) The Frogs (405 BC) Ecclesiazousae (392 BC) Plutus (380 BC)

POLITICAL AND SOCIAL SATIRE OF ARISTOPHANES

This document was originally published in The Drama: Its History, Literature and Influence on Civilization, vol. 2. ed. Alfred Bates. London: Historical Publishing Company, 1906. pp. 55-59.

The general politics of Aristophanes, as set forth in his plays, amount to the stock denunciation of democracy, which, for him, is summed up in the personality of Cleon. There is the usual representation of the masses as readily gulled by flattery, oracles and cries of tyranny; the agitators bid against one another with promises of cheap food and material comforts; the "classes" are represented by the knights, but there is no positive to match this negative, and not even any definite system of reform is shadowed. When Demos is boiled down, he appears simply restored to youth, with all subsequent to the age of Marathon blotted out like a bad dream.

The most definite political topic in Aristophanes is naturally that which touches the life-and-death struggle between the Athenian and Spartan leagues. He is the spokesman of the peace party, and four of his plays are passionate and eloquent pleas for peace. No one can doubt their sincerity; but here again we look in vain for any lofty ideal of politics; nor is there any trace of the poet's having felt very deeply the issues at stake in this war, while seldom does he betray any strong sympathies or antipathies as regards the different types of Greek people drawn into this mortal conflict. The speech in the Acharnians, where he makes Dicaeopolis give serious political advice, minimizes the cause of the war to a quarrel over three harlots; but here he takes care to add that he hates Lacedaemon, and longs for an earthquake to level the proud city with the ground. It is significant that when Peace is drawn up from the pit she is accompanied by Sport and Plenty; all the glories of peace, as painted by Aristophanes, amount to creature comforts and joys, with freedom from the troublesome burdens of war. Elsewhere, indeed, he is forever identifying all that is good and true with a life of martial training and naval prowess; but it is the training and prowess of the last generation.

Intermediate between political and social satire my be noted, as a topic of constant recurrence in Aristophanes, the furor for forensic proceedings which transformed Athens into a city of jurymen. This is treated as a part of democracy, and Cleon is the rallying-point of the wasp-jurors. Social morality, as we have seen, also enters largely into the matter of Greek comedy. If it were necessary to approve or condemn the moral teachings of Aristophanes, it must be confessed it would be very difficult to disentangle the poet's actual sentiments from the comic medium in which they are conveyed, and from the wildness of the Dionysiac festival. But it is a great tribute to his genius that Aristophanes, who disputes with Rabelais the preëminence in coarseness for the whole world's literature, whose highest appeals are to our animal nature, who reforms his repentant jurymen into a life of utter dissoluteness, has impressed half his readers from the days of St. Chrysostom downward as a sublime moralist.

Some of those who admire him in this capacity are troubled by the circumstances that Aristophanes should have attacked Socrates; but this is unintelligible enough when we recognize that in morals, as in every other department, he was the antagonist of what was new. The science of his age he presents as so much quackery, all its religious inquiry he regards as atheism, its varying schools of philosophy are comprehended under the idea of substituting grammatical subtleties for open-air gymnastics; the whole new thought is lumped together and identified with laxity of morals and the presumptuousness of youth. Then, so little open to moral impressions is Aristophanes, in actual fact, that he selects from the band of prominent philosophers, as a personal embodiment for his caricature, the one personage who, by common consent, is allowed to have lived the purest and noblest life that the pre-Christian world ever saw.

In the plays of Aristophanes the whole panorama of Greek society passes before us, each phase touched with the poet's inexhaustible humor. One play is opened with a meeting of Parliament, and the whole machinery of government is presented in caricature--president, ambassadors with high-sounding titles, luxurious envoys; elsewhere a magistrate with his archers of the guard perform their functions, and the punishment of the stocks and of scourging is administered on the stage. The proceedings of the law courts are continually before us, and we are familiar with the ways of the smooth-tongued advocates and the insolence of lawyer-youths. A description is given of a night in the temple of Aesculapius--prototype of our modern hospital--and one scene presents the secret mysteries of the women, while other religious celebrations--bridal and funeral processions, thank-offerings and consecrations--are constantly used to fill up the scenes.

The play opens with the farmer Strepsiades (whose name means "twister") bemoaning the horse addiction of his son Pheidippides which has put him into deep debt. His son refuses to get a job, so Strepsiades decides to go to Socrates' Thinkery (Phrontisterion) to learn rhetoric so he can talk his way out of having to pay his debts.

(Here it is worth noting that the idea of Socrates as a sophist runs contrary to every other account of his career. While he did teach philosophy and rhetoric to his students, he never took money for his teaching, nor did he advocate the relativistic ideas of the other sophists. What Aristophanes intended by confounding Socrates with the sophists is perhaps impossible to determine now. The references to the play that Socrates made during his trial suggest that he did not take the satire very hard, and it is known that Aristophanes and Socrates were drinking buddies.)

Socrates takes Strepsiades into the Thinkery, and explains to him that the gods do not exist, and that the true gods are the Clouds.

Upon learning this, Strepsiades tells his son what he has learned and encourages him to study under Socrates as well. Pheidippides arrives at the Thinkery, and two of Socrates' other students stage a debate for him to encourage him to study there. One of the students goes by the name Kreittôn (Right, Correct, Stronger), and the other goes by the name Êttôn (Wrong, Incorrect, Weaker). These names are a direct reference to Protagoras's statement that a good rhetorician was able to make the weaker argument seem the stronger; a statement seen as one of the key beliefs of the sophists. As the debate gets set up, the audience learns that there are two types of logic taught at the Thinkery. One is the traditional, philosophical education, and the other is the new, sophistic, rhetorical education. Right explains that Pheidippides ought to study the traditional way as it is more moral and manly. Wrong refutes him, using some very twisty logic that winds up (in true Greek comedic fashion), insulting the entire audience in attendance.

Pheidippides agrees to study the new logic at the Thinkery, and Strepsiades learns that the Clouds never existed in the first place. Dejected, he goes to speak to his son and asks him what he has learned. Pheidippides has learned a loophole that will let his father escape from their debts, but he also has learned that he doesn't need to respect his father, and proceeds to explain to his father why it is all right for Pheidippides to strike him. The play ends with Strepsiades free from debt, but stuck with an immoral son who can now talk his way out of anything.

Strepsiades, his son and Socrates (from a 16th Century engraving). The Dramatis Personae in ancient comedy depends on interpretation of textual evidence.[1] This list is based on Alan Sommerstein's translation.[2] Written by Aristophanes Chorus Clouds (goddesses) Characters *Strepsiades an elderly farmer *Pheidippides his son *Slave *Two Students at The Thinkery *Socrates the philosopher *Right an argument *Wrong an argument *First Creditor *Second Creditor *Chaerephon the philosopher Silent Roles *Witness brought by First Creditor *Students at the Thinkery *Slaves to Strepsiades Setting 1.House of Strepsiades 2.The Thinkery (Socrates' school) The Clouds (Νεφέλαι / Nephelai) is a comedy written by the celebrated playwright Aristophanes lampooning intellectual fashions in classical Athens. It was originally produced at the City Dionysia in 423 BC and it was not well received, coming last of the three plays competing at the festival that year. It was revised some time between 420-417 BC and thereafter it was circulated in manuscript form. [3] No copy of the original production survives and scholarly analysis indicates that the revised version is an incomplete form of Old Comedy. This incompleteness however is not obvious in translations and modern performances.[4] The Clouds can be considered not only the world's first extant 'comedy of ideas'[5] but also a brilliant and successful example of that genre.[6] The play gained notoriety for its caricature of the philosopher Socrates ever since its mention in Plato's Apology as a factor contributing to the old man's trial and execution.[7][8]