Reference
- AristophanesGreek comic dramatist (d. ca. 386 bce). His 11 surviving plays are the only extant examples of Athenian Old Comedy. The genre was becoming obsolete in his own lifetime, and there seem to have been few performances of his plays in antiquity after his death. By the end of the 4th century bce Old Comedy had been definitively replaced by Menandrian New Comedy. The dramatic legacy of New Comedy, through Plautus and Terence to the European Renaissance, is immense, whereas Aristophanes' comic mode—a dramatic free form with an almost improvisational feel, great poetic and linguistic inventiveness, highly topical satire (public figures being named and personated on stage), and obscenity beyond almost any subsequent standard of acceptability—never again became a major theatrical tradition...
- LysistrataProduced in late winter 411 BCE, Lysistrata appeared at a moment when the Peloponnesian War was going particularly badly for Athens. As a member of the antiwar faction, Aristophanes had used his comedies regularly to satirize the leaders of the war party and to proselytize for peace. In this brilliantly innovative play, Aristophanes tried a new tactic in his onstage campaign against the war. In doing so, he also invented the first comic heroine, the title character, Lysistrata...
- The WaspsAristophanes produced his political comedy, The Wasps, at the Athenian festival of Lenaea, where it won the first prize. The play succeeds as an admirable piece of stagecraft even though Aristophanes had probably not yet attained to his fullest powers as a comic playwright...
- The FrogsThough modern critics generally regard The Frogs as one of Aristophanes’ weaker plays, it nevertheless won the first prize for comedy at the festival of Lenaea in the year of its production. Moreover, in response to unprecedented public demand, the play enjoyed a second performance the following week.
The play posits that the god Dionysus missed the tragedies produced in the god's honor by the recently deceased playwright, Euripides at the Athenian festival of the Great Dionysia. Dionysus therefore decided to descend into Hades and bring Euripides back to the land of the living. The play begins after Dionysus has reached this decision. Since the god does not know the way to Hades, he and his slave Xanthias seek the advice of the Greek hero and immortal, Heracles (Hercules). Heracles had earlier journeyed to the underworld...
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The Gods Are Laughing: Aristophanes, His Life and Theatre
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WARNING! Viewer Discretion Advised. As irreverent and bawdy as Aristophanes, but with more accessible humor, this pseudo-biography juxtaposes elements of Aristophanic plays with the activities of contemporaneous people to show how Aristophanes became the father of political satire and why his theatrical innovations are still staples of the contemporary theater. Aristophanes is shown as an artist living on the edge, who uses comedy to mock his enemies and wages a one-man campaign against those Athenians who revel in war and death; he is set off against his son, who wants to write to entertain; a coldly rational Socrates; Cephisophon, the Laurence Olivier of ancient Greece; the dictator, Cleon; and Aristophanes’ skeptical mother, who prefers tragedy to comedy. Caution: contains sexual situations. (52 minutes)
Online Resources
- Aristophanes: BritannicaAristophanes, (born c. 450 BCE—died c. 388 BCE), the greatest representative of ancient Greek comedy and the one whose works have been preserved in greatest quantity. He is the only extant representative of the Old Comedy—that is, of the phase of comic dramaturgy (c. 5th century BCE) in which chorus, mime, and burlesque still played a considerable part and which was characterized by bold fantasy, merciless invective and outrageous satire, unabashedly licentious humour, and a marked freedom of political criticism...
- An introduction to... Aristophanes: OxfordThe Athenian comic playwright Aristophanes lived from the middle of the fifth century to the start of the fourth century BCE. Biographical information about him is sketchy at best. We have 11 of his plays, though he wrote at least 44. He is the sole exemplar of the genre known as ‘Old Comedy’ whose work has survived intact, although we do have significant fragments from several other important comedy writers including Eupolis and Cratinus...
Perspectives
Aristophanes
This book places the plays of Aristophanes in their contemporary context, asking what aspects of Greek, and especially Athenian, culture these comedies brought into play for their original audiences. It makes particular use of the structural analysis of Greek rituals and myths to demonstrate how their meanings and functions can be used to interpret the plays. This information is then used to suggest ways in which twentieth-century audiences may read the plays in terms of contemporary literary theories and concerns. This is the first book to apply the techniques of structural anthropology systematically to all the comedies. It does not impose a single interpretative structure on the plays but argues that each play operates with a range of different structures, and that groups of plays use similar structures in different ways. All Greek is translated.
Acharnians, Clouds, Knights, Wasps
Greek text and English translation on opposite pages; notes and introductory material in English.
Lysistrata by Aristophanes
- Films on Demand This link opens in a new windowWARNING! Viewer Discretion Advised. This content contains images of people consuming alcohol. This video contains violent images. This video contains mature themes. Lysistrata is a comedy that contains basic truths of the time. The women form an anti-war campaign and Lysistrata proposes a sex strike to bring an end to the war.