Comedy, Philosophy, and History in Athens

Aristophanes (c. 446-386 BCE) is the only writer of Old Comedy, the earliest phase of Greek comic drama, whose plays survive complete, eleven out of a much larger original output. Old Comedy, performed like tragedy at Athenian festivals such as the City Dionysia and the Lenaia, was topical, obscene, fantastical, and sharply political, freely lampooning living Athenian public figures by name, including the general Cleon, the philosopher Socrates, pilloried in Clouds as a sophist running a school of dubious reasoning, and the tragedian Euripides. Structurally, Old Comedy plays typically combine an improbable comic premise, such as a private citizen making a separate peace with Sparta or birds building a utopian city in the sky, with a parabasis, a choral interlude in which the chorus steps out of the dramatic action to address the audience directly, often voicing the poet's own opinions on current politics. Aristophanes's comedy is prized both as unmatched verbal and theatrical inventiveness, combining puns, mock-epic parody, and dazzling choral lyric within the same plays, and as an invaluable, if satirically distorted, historical source for Athenian political and intellectual life during the Peloponnesian War.