Aristophanes

Aristophanes (c. 445-385 BC) was the leading comic playwright of ancient Athens and one of the great figures of classical Greek literature. He wrote in Attic Greek, and his work belongs to what is called Old Comedy, a genre whose most valuable surviving examples are his. He is known as "the Father of Comedy" and "the Prince of Ancient Comedy", and he is said to have brought Athenian life to the stage more vividly than any other author. He wrote about forty plays, of which eleven survive almost complete.

He was an Athenian citizen from the deme of Kydathenaion, in the tribe of Pandionis. His father was called Philippus and his mother Zenodora. Ancient writers assumed that his family had links with the island of Aegina, though that detail is itself inferred from his plays. Very little is known of his private life. His plays are the main source, especially the parabasis, the passage in which the chorus spoke on the author's behalf. Those passages tell us about his career as a dramatist, but hardly anything reliable about his personal beliefs.

His plays were performed at Athens's great religious festivals, chiefly the City Dionysia and the Lenaia, where they competed against other authors and several won first prize. Playwrights of the time usually directed their own productions, and the term didaskalos, literally "teacher", referred to his role in training the chorus. His comedies combine absurd premises, earthy language, wordplay and direct political satire. His targets included real figures such as Euripides, Alcibiades and the demagogue Cleon, as well as contemporary events such as the Peloponnesian War.

His outlook was conservative. He defended traditional religious myths, distrusted new philosophical teaching and criticised the rhetoric of the sophists, whom he saw as a danger to ordinary citizens. His hostility to Socrates is the best known: in The Clouds he portrays him as a charlatan who corrupts the young. Plato linked that play to the reputation that contributed to Socrates's trial, although other satirists had also caricatured the philosopher. In literary matters he faulted Euripides for departing from the classical model, even though he seems to have borrowed a good deal from Euripides's style.

His legacy is twofold. Ancient commentators and Quintilian praised his language as a model of the Attic dialect, and that esteem may have helped his works survive into the Roman and Byzantine periods. Beyond that, his way of turning the politics, religion and culture of his day into comedy set the pattern for much later satire.