Aristophanes
Aristophanes
Circa 446-Circa 386 b.c.e.
Poet
Comedy. The works of Aristophanes are the only surviving examples of fifth-century Attic comedy known as Old Comedy. His first play Banqueters was produced in 427 b.c.e., but is nonextant. The titles of his extant works are Acharnians (425), Knights (424), Wasps (422), Peace (421), Birds (414), Lysistrata (411), Thesmophoriazousai(411) , Frogs (405), Assemblywomen (392), and Wealth (388); there is also Clouds, an incompletely revised and never performed version of his comedy of 423 b.c.e. The first two and Frogs are known to have won first prize in the Lênaia, and indeed Frogs was given the exceptional honor of a second performance and earned its author the prestige of a crown of sacred olive for its sage political advice. Although it is difficult to determine whether Athenians expected anything at all serious in the way of advice from Old Comedy, the reception of Frogs must count as some evidence that they were prepared to listen on occasion. The same judgment may be deduced from the traditions of legal action taken against comic poets in general and Aristophanes in particular. The suit brought by Cleon, the target of Aristophanes’ lost second play, Babylonians, and extant Knights, only makes sense if the medium was not regarded as simply one for clowning.
Favorite Targets. The first nine plays were written during the catastrophic Second Peloponnesian War (431-404 b.c.e.) between Athens and Sparta, and Aristophanes consistently argues for peace in them: the parabasis allows the playwright a direct utterance of views not afforded to tragedians (who in any case did not deal with contemporary events). Elsewhere, favorite targets include populist politicians (such as Cleon), corrupting philosophers (Socrates in Clouds), and new-fangled tragedians (above all Euripides in Thesmophoriazousai and Frogs). Although he is superficially a conservative in his depiction of the triumph of simple, old-fashioned heroes (often to the discomfort of more sophisticated characters), he is, in one scholar’s words, a playwright “deeply imbued with irreverence,” and he frequently ridicules traditional views and values too. The surface hostility to innovation masks a profound debt to it: a contemporary comic poet coined the verb euripidaristophanizein—“to behave like Euripides and Aristophanes”—to suggest the identity of the comedian’s targets and models. Later and friendlier critics also emphasized his innovation by presenting him as a writer who had advanced Old Comedy beyond the crude simplicity of his predecessors early in his career and, at its end, laid the foundation for New Comedy.
Source
Angus Bowie, Aristophanes: Myth, Ritual and Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).