Apart from evidence in the plays themselves, we know next to nothing about Aristophanes. An anonymous Life informs us that he was the son of one Philippus and belonged to the deme (district) Cydathenaeum in Athens, which included the Acropolis, but we do not know, for example, whether his family was rich or poor. Lines in his play Peace (421 BCE) inform us that he went bald at a young age, but we know nothing more of his appearance. Even the dates of his birth and death are unclear (though circa 446–386 BCE is the general consensus).
We learn more about Aristophanes from his plays’ parabaseis. Common in fifth-century BCE comedy, these interludes, in which the actors exit and leave the chorus alone onstage, are occasionally employed by Aristophanes to speak directly to the audience. From them we learn details about his early and middle years. A parabasis in Clouds reveals that he was a precocious playwright, having had his first two plays, Banqueters (427 BCE) and Babylonians (426 BCE), produced for him because he had not yet reached an age at which he could produce them himself. This precociousness wasn’t just a matter of artistic talent; he was also preternaturally drawn to controversy from the very start of his career. In Babylonians, before he was even twenty, Aristophanes initiated a vehement campaign of ridicule against the famous general and demagogue Cleon, who rose to political prominence by opposing the more cautious strategy of the preeminent statesman Pericles (ca. 495–429 BCE) in the Peloponnesian War. Mockery of prominent citizens (who were likely in the audience) is a hallmark of Aristophanic comedy, but Aristophanes’s insults targeting Cleon are especially virulent. After his initial attack, Cleon, in revenge, prosecuted him for “wronging the city,” but the young man was acquitted. In his next play, Acharnians (425 BCE), Aristophanes threatens, through the chorus, to “cut [Cleon] up to make soles for the Horsemen’s shoes” (lines 299–302), and this threat is fulfilled in The Knights (424 BCE), in which he again attacks Cleon, portraying him, onstage, as a deceitful and corrupt warmonger. Subsequently, and probably in reaction to this, Cleon prosecuted Aristophanes again, this time for xenias—assuming citizen rights though not the son of citizens—but this prosecution, too, came to nothing. Though these attacks were (mostly) behind Aristophanes in Clouds (423 BCE), he expresses pride in them, as he says in the play’s parabasis:
It was I
who struck a blow at Cleon’s paunch when he was in his pride . . . (583–584)
Cleon died a year later while serving as general in the Battle of Amphipolis in Thrace, thus depriving Aristophanes of his favorite object of ridicule. Apart from declaring his precociousness and his animus toward Cleon, however, the parabaseis in Aristophanes’s plays give us little in the way of biographical information. By the late 410s, Aristophanes started omitting parabaseis from his plays (Lysistrata, first produced in 411, does not have one, but Frogs, first produced in 405, does), and we know nothing about his later years.
Despite the obscurity of the man, his work commands respect and dominates our understanding of theatrical comedy in classical antiquity. In a career that spanned forty years (427–388 BCE), Aristophanes composed at least forty plays, at least three of which won first prize at dramatic festivals. In a parabasis in Clouds, he criticizes his rival comedic playwrights for repackaging old material year after year and boasts of his own inventiveness:
I’d never try to swindle you by putting out the same play two
or three times. Furthermore, I’m good at introducing fresh ideas,
each unlike the others, all of them quite clever. (Clouds 581–583)
Apparently, playgoers, both in fifth-century Athens and later, agreed. Not only did Aristophanes win accolades in his time, but more than a quarter of his output—eleven plays in all—has survived. A little further along in the same parabasis quoted above, Aristophanes prophetically anticipates his work being read in future ages:
If you delight in me and my inventions,
however, people in the future will remember you as wise. (Clouds 596–597)
Given the momentous historical transitions he witnessed—the glory of Periclean Athens in his youth, the Peloponnesian War in his adulthood, and the attempted revival of Athens in his old age—and how he responded to them in his comic art, Aristophanes is a singularly important, utterly unique writer.
The Golden Age of Athens
During most of Aristophanes’s lifetime, Athens was the seat of a sprawling naval empire and the great cultural center of its time. Pericles not only secured the military superiority of Athens throughout the region during his years of leadership (from 461 to 429 BCE), but he also ensured that literature, art, and architecture flourished there, extending its power and influence. In 447 (around the time Aristophanes was born), following the Persian Wars, Pericles initiated an ambitious program to rebuild the Acropolis—the spiritual center of the city. The Parthenon, perhaps now the most famous building of all of antiquity, was mostly completed by 432 BCE. Vast in size and regarded as “the most perfect Doric temple ever built,” it has come to symbolize the power, wealth, and culture of Athens’s Golden Age.* The other prominent buildings visible on the Acropolis today also date to this era: the Propylaea (completed 432 BCE), the Temple of Athena Nike (completed ca. 420 BCE), and the Erechtheum (completed 406 BCE).
This period also produced what have been traditionally regarded as the first works of history—systematic and serious inquiries into the past. In his Histories, Herodotus (ca. 484–425 BCE) investigated the origin of the conflict between Greeks and the peoples of the East and brought his account down to his own time. Thucydides (ca. 460–400 BCE), anticipating that the Peloponnesian War would be a major one, wrote a thorough and detailed account of the war from its inception. Though it originated in the sixth century BCE, tragedy also flourished in Athens, with tragedians such as Aeschylus (ca. 523–456 BCE), Sophocles (ca. 497–405 BCE), and Euripides (ca. 480–406 BCE) competing at dramatic festivals for prizes. Euripides was prominent enough to be a recurring character in Aristophanes’s plays, and Frogs features Aeschylus as a character as well.
Fifth-century Athens was also host to some of the age’s leading orators and rhetoricians. Because the path to social advancement for any Athenian was through the Assembly and the law courts, there was wide demand for instruction in public speaking and persuasion. Foreign intellectuals came to Athens from throughout the region to meet that demand, sparking the so-called Sophistic Enlightenment. These men were widely sought after as tutors, but also produced bodies of work (and acolytes) that extended their influence beyond their immediate students. Protagoras of Abdera (ca. 490–420 BCE), the earliest of the sophists, is known for being a religious agnostic and a relativist regarding the truth (claiming, famously, that “man is the measure of all things”). The rhetorician Gorgias of Leontini (ca. 485–390 BCE) was famous for taking difficult, seemingly impossibly paradoxical positions and persuasively arguing for them—even asserting (in a lost work) for the nonexistence of Being. Another sophist, Prodicus of Ceos (ca. 465–395 BCE), opened a school in Athens and gave lectures on “the correctness of names,” among other subjects. Associated (somewhat unjustly) with these figures by some Athenians—and especially by Aristophanes—Socrates (ca. 470–399) spent a great deal of time in the agora (marketplace) discussing moral philosophy, among other philosophical topics, with a group of young disciples, including Plato (429–ca. 347 BCE), who later secured the fame of his teacher by writing down recollections of some of the master’s provocative dialogues. Barefoot and unkempt, and an object of curiosity and contempt among many Athenians, Socrates was prominent enough in Athens to earn an appearance as a character in Aristophanes’s Clouds. His teachings, and especially the challenges he posed to some of the city’s most eminent and reputedly wise men, eventually provoked the citizens of Athens to put Socrates to death after trying and convicting him of impiety.
This period of prosperity and intellectual ferment, unmatched even by Renaissance Florence, came to an end in 404 BCE, when Athens was compelled to give up its naval empire as a consequence of losing a protracted war with Sparta.
The Peloponnesian War
The Peloponnesian War serves as the raison d’être for Lysistrata, looms large in the background of Clouds and Birds, and lingers as the haunting past in Women of the Assembly. An overview of this conflict and its causes will be useful for appreciating, in context, the plays in this volume.
Early in the fifth century, to fend off a Persian invasion (481–479 BCE), the Greek states formed an alliance, the Delian League, to which allies contributed ships for a Panhellenic navy. After the war, the Athenians assumed leadership of this league and started to allow member states to pay tribute money in lieu of supplying ships and sailors. This policy served to consolidate naval power in the Athenians’ hands. When Athens refused to allow member states to leave the league, it became clear that its aspirations were imperial, and the Spartans and their allies responded by forming a separate Peloponnesian League in opposition. The expansion of the Athenian Empire under the leadership of Pericles eventually caused enough friction with Sparta and its allies that Sparta felt it had no choice but to declare war.
For nearly thirty years, from 431 to 404 BCE (with a short-lived peace in 421 BCE), the Athenians and Spartans fought for supremacy in the Greek-speaking world. During the first decade of the conflict, known as the Archidamian War (431–421 BCE), King Archidamus of Sparta annually invaded and ravaged the Attic countryside outside Athens. These invasions caused rural residents to move inside the city walls, and the resulting overpopulation created conditions ripe for the spread of the Great Plague (430–426 BCE) there. In 425 BCE, under the generalship of Cleon, the Athenians captured Spartan soldiers off Pylos on the island of Sphacteria. They used the threat of executing these prisoners of war as leverage to stop the annual Spartan incursions. After the Battle of Amphipolis (422 BCE), in which both Cleon and the Spartan general Brasidas were killed, both sides were exhausted and ready for peace. The Athenian general Nicias and the Spartan king Pleistoanax then negotiated a treaty, the Peace of Nicias, in which each side agreed to return nearly all of the cities and territory it had taken in the war. Skirmishes soon broke out again, however, and a resumption of hostilities seemed inevitable.
In 415 BCE the Athenians launched an armada to conquer Sicily under the generals Nicias, Lamachus, and Alcibiades. Since the Spartans sent troops to support some native Sicilian states, the conflict in Sicily served, in effect, as a proxy war between the Athenians and Spartans. This invasion proved a disastrous failure for the Athenians, with two of the generals dying there, and the third, Alcibiades, defecting to the Spartan side. After the collapse of the Sicilian expedition, Sparta encouraged the subject states in the Athenian Empire to revolt. Much of Ionia (now coastal Turkey) did. As a consequence of these losses, men opposed to democracy overthrew the government in Athens and established, in 411 BCE, an oligarchy known as “the Four Hundred,” which lasted only a few months.
The following years saw the Persian Empire again become influential by providing the traditionally landlocked Spartans with ships. Eventually, the Spartans, under their general Lysander, defeated the Athenian armada at the Battle of Aegospotami in 405 BCE. The following year, they compelled the Athenians to surrender, requiring them to take down the city’s defensive walls, disband their fleet, and accept a pro-Spartan government under thirty oligarchs known as “the Thirty.” The war was over; Athens had lost. Though a band of exiled Athenians under Thrasybulus ousted the Thirty and restored democracy in 403 BCE, Athens never regained its former prominence.
Men and Women, Citizens and Slaves
Although in the popular imagination Athens is sometimes characterized as the birthplace of democracy, we should keep important distinctions in mind. First, Athens was a radical, not a representative, democracy: any adult male citizen could propose measures and vote in the Assembly, the equivalent of the American legislative branch. Second, all this flourishing had a darker side: as with all Greek states at the time, there was the large, ever-present, and nearly voiceless population of slaves.
Although slaves occupied the lowest place in the Athenian social hierarchy, there were still distinctions among them, with the Scythian archers of the state police force, for example, possessing greater prestige than agricultural laborers. That even middle-class Athenians could afford slaves freed up a large segment of the population to cultivate the arts and participate in the political process, so a great deal of “the glory that was Greece” depended on slave labor. As a sort of symbol of slaves’ intimate relationship with the Athenian economy, it was they who worked the lucrative silver mines at Laurion, roughly fifty miles south of Athens, in order to provide material for Athens’s silver coinage, which in turn financed its military adventures and great civic projects. In the plays that follow, you will encounter Strepsiades in Clouds threatening to strike a slave, Peisthetaerus in Birds insulting one as stupid, and even Lysistrata in her play speaking roughly to her Scythian slave girl—and in none of those instances is the action of the slave owner implied to be questionable. While in Aristophanes’s plays slaves are little more than the butt of a joke here and there, we would do well to acknowledge that the entire edifice of the glorious civilization that was fifth-century Athens, including its rich tradition of theatrical performance, was built on a foundation of forced, uncompensated labor. Athenians themselves may have been willfully blind to the injustice of reserving democratic self-determination for themselves and relegating their defeated enemies to abject servitude, but it is impossible for us now to ignore it.
Male citizens had the right to own property such as slaves and to transact business, but they were also liable to being called up for military service. They were able to operate both within the polis (city-state) and the oikos (home), whereas the wives and daughters of citizens were mostly confined to the latter. Given their confinement and the comparative scarcity of historical evidence about them, it is striking how prominently women figure in Aristophanes’s plays, as in Greek drama generally. Indeed, two of the plays in this volume—Lysistrata and Women of the Assembly—enact scenarios in which women overturn the social order and seize power for themselves. A reader or playgoer might be forgiven for interpreting this fact as evidence of a rosier underlying social reality, or perhaps inferring something like proto-feminist intent on the playwright’s part, but neither is true. Women in fifth-century Athens did not have suffrage, nor were they allowed to own property or represent themselves in court. A free female had to have a kyrios (male legal representative)—usually her father until she married, then her husband—to manage all of her social and economic relations beyond the most quotidian household duties. Respectable females only left home on special occasions, for weddings, funerals, and some religious festivals, and they are often depicted with white skin in vase paintings, because they were rarely out in the sun. There were other classes of females—hetaerae (courtesans), pornoi (prostitutes), and impoverished women, who had considerably more freedom of movement—but what they gained in mobility they paid for by being forced into more precarious, even dangerous circumstances. Respectable women were mostly limited to the roles of wife and mother, though some few could become priestesses. Their occupations were domestic, such as supervising household tasks and slaves, raising children, and making clothing. The “double standard” was even more marked in Athens than in the United States today, since, whereas husbands were free to seek sexual relations outside of the marriage, females were closely guarded.
Lysistrata and Women of the Assembly give a voice to Athenian women and a glimpse into their daily lives, but we should note that male actors played female characters as a travesty, and Aristophanes’s portrayals perpetuated stereotypes about females, such as bibulousness and sex obsession. Furthermore, in order to carry out their programs, Lysistrata and Praxagora become “man-like women,” both acting and speaking in traditionally masculine ways. For example, the Athenians Lysistrata, Calonice, and Myrrhine look with the “male gaze” on the bodies of the Spartan Lampito and the representative from Boeotia. Additionally, in the blessed state at the end of Lysistrata and Women of the Assembly, slaves, both male and female, remain in their oppressed position. Praxagora explicitly states that there will be slaves in her collectivist utopia: when her husband Blepyrus asks, “Who will till the soil?” she answers:
The slaves will do it. All you’ll have to do
is put on scent and go to dinner when the shadow of the sundial
grows to ten feet long. (Women of the Assembly 735–737)
In the end, one can accept Lysistrata and Praxagora as proto-feminist heroes only with major reservations.
Theater in Athens
Aristophanes’s plays were originally performed at competitive dramatic festivals called the Lenaea and the City Dionysia. Held in the winter month of Gamelium (roughly equivalent to January), the Lenaea was a religious festival in honor of Dionysus Lenaeus. The audience for this festival consisted primarily of Athenian citizens because the sea was regarded as too rough for travel. Held during the month of Elaphebolium in the spring, the City Dionysia, in contrast, accommodated a larger cosmopolitan audience. After three days of performances of tragedies there, three comedies were performed on the same day. At both of these festivals, judges representative of the ten tribes of Athens cast votes ranking the comedies in order of merit, and five of their opinions were then chosen at random to decide first, second, and third places. In some of the plays in this volume, you’ll notice that Aristophanes, through the chorus, often addresses these judges, subjecting them to flattery and mock threats.
In the second half of the fifth and early fourth centuries BCE, the Theater of Dionysus at Athens consisted simply of the south slope of the Acropolis and a roughly circular plane at its base. Temporary seats called ikria (planks for benches) were installed for performances. A temporary wooden backdrop called a skēnē was set up in the playing space. The skēnē usually had two doors in it for productions of comedy, and thus there were normally four ways for actors to make their entrances—through either of the doors or down one of the two side aisles (eisodoi). The skēnē, with its doors, often represented the houses of neighbors in a “middle-class” Athenian neighborhood. Thus Lysistrata at the beginning of her play greets her neighbor Myrrhine, and in Women of the Assembly, a character simply called “Neighbor” calls out to Blepyrus. The skēnē is very versatile, however—later in Lysistrata, for example, it represents the hill of the Acropolis itself, and in Birds, one of its doors represents the entrance to the Hoopoe Tereus’s nest. All productions of ancient Greek drama took place during the daytime, and there was no equivalent of modern stage lighting.
Ancient Greek drama used several contraptions that seem awkward and artificial to us. Comedy borrowed from tragedy a cantilevered crane called the mēchanē by which a god would often make his or her entrance “flying” (suspended by a rope). In productions of tragedy, gods were often set down on top of the skēnē, where they would speak down to other characters (and the audience) from “on high.” Drawing on the association of this contraption with the loftier genre of tragedy, Aristophanes used it for travesty and burlesque. In Clouds, for example, Socrates, a mere mortal, enters on the mēchanē like a god and speaks, at first, in tragic pastiche. The irony is that he, allegedly a disbeliever in the traditional Greek gods, is said to “look / down on the gods” from on high (lines 260–261). In Birds the goddess Iris flies in on the mēchanē only to be threatened with violence by the mortal Peisthetaerus. Comedy also occasionally employed a narrow wooden platform on wheels called the enkyklema. This device was used to turn the setting inside out, that is, to roll out characters who would otherwise be concealed behind the skēnē. In Clouds the enkyklema was used for the entrance of the pale, emaciated students from the Thinkery. They are, we are told, wheeled back in because it “is forbidden to them to remain / out in the open air for very long” (lines 230–231).
Whereas in tragedy the setting almost always remains fixed once it is established at the beginning of the play, in comedy the setting regularly “refocuses” to a new location. The setting can shift from Lysistrata’s and Myrrhine’s houses to the Acropolis, for example, or from the Neighbor’s and Blepyrus’s houses to those of the First Old Woman and the Girl. Finally, whereas the events of a tragedy are represented as taking place within a single day, scenes in comedy often take place several days after preceding scenes, so that, for example, we can see the effects of the sex strike on the men of both Athens and Sparta in Lysistrata.
The Plays
Of the four plays in the volume, Clouds (423 BCE) and Birds (414 BCE) were produced at the City Dionysia, and Lysistrata (411 BCE) was most likely produced at the Lenaea. It is not known at which festival Women of the Assembly (391 BCE) was produced. Scholars have assigned three of these plays—Clouds, Birds, and Lysistrata—to the category of “Old Comedy,” and one of them, Women of the Assembly, to “Middle Comedy.” The former three share a tendency toward personal invective against particular politicians and intellectuals, whereas Women of the Assembly focuses more on social themes. Furthermore, in Middle Comedy, choral odes are less often integral to the plot, if they are preserved at all, and few are preserved in Women of the Assembly. Also, whereas in Clouds there is an extended and striking parodos (entry song for the chorus), in Women of the Assembly there is no parodos at all—the chorus members simply come walking on singly and in groups and are greeted by Praxagora. This play also exhibits the “neighborly” middle-class settings standard in Middle Comedy. Finally, the parabasis (in which the playwright would, at times, address the audience) vanishes in Middle Comedy. We can see a trajectory of lessening importance for parabaseis from Clouds to Birds, to Lysistrata (which lacks a proper parabasis), to Women of the Assembly, in which there is not even the hint of one.
Despite their differences, however, these four plays share the “Great Idea” plot structure characteristic of Aristophanes. In each, a character comes up with an “ingenious” plan to solve a problem: in Clouds Strepsiades tries to clear his debts through the use of the “Wrong Argument”; in Birds, Peisthetaerus escapes life in Athens to create a utopia; in her play, Lysistrata plots to end the war through a sex strike; and in Women of the Assembly, Praxagora replaces a male-dominated, capitalistic democracy with a female-run, communistic one. Whereas the last three schemes meet with unmitigated success in the worlds of their plays, Strepsiades is the outlier—he does indeed escape his debts, at least for a time, but must accept the moral ruin of his son Pheidippides (and a beating at his hands).
It is clear that Aristophanes, like many of his contemporaries, was anxious about the moral relativism associated with the Sophistic Enlightenment. It is also clear, however, that Aristophanes himself was partly a product of this intellectual environment. In these plays we find agones (formal and rhetorical debates such as are common in the plays of Euripides). The most hyped of them is the debate in Clouds between the traditionalist Right Argument and the sophistic Wrong Argument over the subsequent course of education. The strong female leads, however, both engage in agones and are triumphant in them. Lysistrata proves that females are competent to govern the city and the empire in her debate with the Commissioner, and at the end of her arguments supporting communistic versus capitalistic democracy, Praxagora leaves her husband Blepyrus with nothing to say. She, in fact, informs us that she learned to speak so persuasively by listening to her contemporary male Athenians in the Assembly (Women of the Assembly 277–279). In the end, as harshly as Aristophanes lampoons the “new education” in Clouds, many of his characters cannot escape its influence.
I chose to collect these four plays by Aristophanes in one volume primarily because they are my favorites. I find the utopian idealism of Birds balances well with the moral ugliness we find in Clouds. Furthermore, I simply couldn’t resist the challenge of translating Tereus’s gorgeous lyrical summons of all the avian species in Birds. Lysistrata, the most popular of Aristophanes’s plays in the contemporary world, was a must, though I confess I found the challenge that the Spartan “dialect” presented in translation alluring as well. I included Women of the Assembly because it develops themes that are introduced in Lysistrata and, with its protracted threat of onstage defecation, gives us a ne plus ultra in terms of obscenity. Also, it is timely in that it presents female legislators who work to “socialize” democracy. Finally, in terms of theater history, these four plays plot a clear trajectory from Old Comedy to Middle Comedy in which we can see a decrease in the role of the chorus (especially in Women of the Assembly) and the phasing out of the parabasis, and together they provide a clear picture of the deepest roots of contemporary comedy.
Additionally, as a citizen of a democracy, I felt a duty to make clear, in an era in which there are calls for “civility” in political discourse, that there is such a thing as patriotic obscenity. The citizens of ancient Athens enjoyed a freedom of speech as broad as our own. This freedom, parrhesia, was essentially the right to say what one pleased, how and when one pleased, and to whom. I wanted to make translations that celebrate Aristophanes’s parrhesia for the English-speaking world. Furthermore, whatever one’s political leanings, one can appreciate that when a person in power behaves obscenely, obscenity is a fitting way of condemning that behavior. “Civil” discourse, in contrast, lacks the same visceral impact. Aristophanes teaches the contemporary reader that crudity is appropriate in criticizing the crude, that, in terms of discourse, one may fight fire with fire, and this struck me as a necessary lesson.
* John Julius Norwich, Great Architecture of the World (Da Capo, 2001), p. 63.