Aristophanés, the greatest of Attic, if not of all, comedians, was born about 448 B.C. His father held property in Ægina, which explains the poet's allusion (Acharnians) to the claim of that island by the Spartans, in order to secure him, and also his prosecution by Cleon on the charge of usurping civic rights. Of his personal history we have nothing recorded, except his deme and tribe, and that he had three sons—Philippos, Ararôs, and Nikostratos—all comic poets. The old comedy, of which Aristophanes is to us the representative, exercised an influence akin to that of the public press of our day in pamphlets and newspaper articles; it claimed to be guardian and censor of public morals, and the critic of current events. During the sixty years in which it flourished under the Athenian democracy, its distinctive feature was its plain-spoken and personal character. Full license for riotous fun and banter was given it by the season of its exhibition—viz. the Dionysiac festival. Its shafts were chiefly aimed at radical tendencies and novelties of any kind. Its plots were political burlesques; its famous parabases were addresses of the chorus to the audience, explaining its views on subjects of the moment—somewhat like the topical song in our pantomimes. Aristophanes is said to have written fifty-four plays, but eleven only are extant, which may be ranged under the categories of political, philosophical, social, and literary; and again under three periods, ending respectively 425, 406, and 388 B.C., about which last date he died. To the first period belong (1) the Acharnians, (2) the Knights, (3) the Clouds, (4) the Wasps, the poet's four masterpieces, named from their respective choruses, and (5) the Peace, in all of which full rein is given to political satire. To the second, (6) the Birds, (7) the Lysistrata, (8) the Thesmophoriazusæ, (9) the Frogs, in which we find less political rancour, and more reticence and caution. To the third, the Ecclesiastusæ and Plutus, comedies of a tamer type, known as that of the middle comedy, in which political allusions and the distinctive characteristic of the old comedy, the parabasis, disappear.
Aristophanes made his debut with the Revellers (427 B.C.), in which the teaching of the Sophists, then becoming fashionable, is contrasted with the simplicity of the old education. It was followed by the Babylonians, a satire on the various magistracies in Athens, which contained incidentally a preliminary attack on Cleon, one of his bêtes noires, to which the poet alludes in his next year's play, the Acharnians (425 B.C., the seventh year of the Peloponnesian war). This was brought out, as were also the other two, in the name of Kallistratos. In this, the first of his eleven extant plays, Aristophanes pleads the cause of the aristocratic peace-party against the democratic war-party, whose selfish aims and place-hunting, disguised under the cloak of patriotism, he exposes with unsparing ridicule. Dikaiopolis, an honest farmer, concludes a peace for thirty years between himself and family on the one side, and the Spartans and their allies on the other, and keeps the rural Dionysia after six years' interval. The old charcoal-burners of Acharnai, who will not hear of peace, because their lands have been ruined by the Spartan invasion, attack him; but he pleads the enemy's cause, and converts half the chorus to his view, while the malcontent half fetch the swash-buckler general Lamachos to overawe the traitor. Dikaiopolis holds open market with the sworn enemies of
Athens, and enjoys himself in the midst of his good cheer, while Lamachos is depicted in piteous flight and mortal pain, after the hardships of campaigning.
The Knights (424 B.C.) was the first play produced in the poet's own name. It is aimed entirely at Cleon the tanner, the most prominent demagogue of the day, whose success at Pylos was a bitter disappointment to his opponents. Dêmos, the Athenian John Bull, is a cross, dull-witted, and superstitious old man, who has intrusted the management of his household to a bullying Paphlagonian slave (Cleon). Two of his fellow-slaves (Demosthenes and Nicias) conspire against his tyranny, with the Knights, who represent the richer classes of Athens, and contrive that he shall be supplanted by a sausage-seller. Dêmos is then renovated by being boiled, and becomes youthful and sensible once more.
The Clouds (423 B.C.) is a protest against the growing spirit of scepticism at Athens, where it was becoming the fashion for youths to frequent the new schools of the Sophists. To the conservative instincts of Aristophanes this was bitter gall, and he ridiculed the whole profession with Socrates at their head. The latter, by his ungainly personality and eccentric habits, was a good subject for caricature; but Aristophanes' picture is no truthful portrait of the great philosopher, one of whose chief aims and merits was to expose shams.
Strepsiades is being ruined by his spendthrift son Phiedippides (Alcibiades). His only chance of safety is to send his son to the 'Phrontistery' or Pensoir of Socrates, where he will learn to make the worse appear the better reason, which his creditors unfortunately hold. The son bluntly refusing, the father goes himself, but proves too stupid and forgetful to learn; so the son reluctantly enters the school, and learns the worse reason with a vengeance. In the famous dialogue between the Just and the Unjust Argument, the latter wins the day, and so obtains the control of the pupil, who is imbued with the new ideas so thoroughly, that, at a feast given him by his father on his return home, he sings an immoral speech from Euripides, beats his father, and justifies the act by his newly learned sophistry. The eyes of the old man are opened, and he wreaks his vengeance on Socrates by setting the Pensoir and its inmates on fire.
The Clouds is unequalled in ancient comedy for simplicity and perfection of plot, and morality of tone. It is the nearest approach to a modern French play; it exhibits the development of a possible action and real characters, and not merely a string of comic situations. In repartee it is not excelled by any play of Molière, and Shakespeare at his best shows no richer humour.
The Wasps (422 B.C.), of which Racine's one comedy Les Plaideurs is an imitation, is a counterpart of the Clouds, in which a father converts his son, while in the Wasps a son reforms his father. The two principal characters are Philocleon, an old dikast, and his son Bdelycleon, who tries to cure his father of his mania for sitting in the court, and gets up for him a mock trial of a dog at home. In the latter half of the play, the vulgar element predominates; it represents Philocleon's conversion to the ways of society, but he behaves unexpectedly with more than the license of youth.
The Peace (421 B.C.) may be called a leading article in favour of the Peace of Nicias, when both Cleon and Brasidas were dead. The first half of the play represents the recovery of Peace from heaven, whither Trygæos had gone on a beetle's back to fetch her; the second, the social enjoyments which welcome her restoration to the earth. Its hearty humour, its beautiful descriptions of rural life and its pleasures, are inimitable.
The Birds (414 B.C.) is a brilliant pantomime. Its aim is vague if looked on as a satire. It was composed at a period of great excitement, when Athens was in the fever-heat of preparation for the Sicilian expedition, and Alcibiades was in every mouth, but it was not produced until eight months afterwards. Peithetairos (Alcibiades) and his friend Euelpides start a scheme for making the birds build a city (Cloud-cuckoo-town) in mid-air, and establish their sovereignty, so as to shut off the gods, and intercept men's offerings to them. The gods submit and allow Basileia, daughter of Zeus, to be married to Peithetairos.
The Lysistrata, or 'Strike of the Wives' (411 B.C.), exhibits the women of all Greece taking the question of war into their own hands, and refusing their lords their rights until they consent to make peace.
The Thesmophoriazusæ, the most diverting of all Aristophanes' plays, was brought out three months later. It contains an attack on the morality of Athenian women and on Euripides; it does not interfere in politics.
The Frogs (405 B.C.) is a literary criticism. The first part contains the adventures of Dionysos on his journey to Hades in search of a good poet, Sophocles and Euripides being just dead; the second, the poetical contest between Æschylus and Euripides, and the victory of the former.
In the Ecclesiæzusæ (393 B.C.), or 'Ladies in Parliament,' Aristophanes satirises the communistic theories which were afloat, by making the women occupy the Pnyx, disguised as men, and decree a new constitution with full community of property and wives. The play is remarkable for its witty repartee.
The Plutus (388 B.C.) is unique among Aristophanes' plays. It is a satire on humanity; its subject, the unjust distribution of wealth, the cause of which is the blindness of Plutus. His sight is restored to him by Asklepios, and then matters are righted; the god bestows his favours only on the deserving, to the ruin of many evil trades.
The choruses are the part of his work on which Aristophanes lavished the greatest wealth of his exuberant fancy. A study of these will give an idea of the varied resources of his genius, passing with prodigious fullness of the most comical fancies to the most charming descriptions, such as recall the idyllic grace of Theocritus, and to the most sublime conceptions.
The first printed edition of Aristophanes was the Aldine (Venice, 1498); it contains nine plays. Junta (1515) added two. Other editions are those of Bergler (1760), Brunck (1783), Invernizzi-Beck (1794), containing a collation of the Ravenna or oldest MS., Bekker (1829), Dindorf (Poetæ Scenici, 5th ed. 1869), Bergk (1857), Meineke (1860), Blaydes (1886), Holden (5th ed. 1887). There are translations of single plays by Mitchell (1822), J. H. Frere, Walsh (1837), B. B. Rogers, B. H. Kennedy, R. Y. Tyrrell (1883).