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Aristophanes
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Aristophanes’ first comedy was produced in 427 and his last in 386 or later. At least once he produced a comedy in the theater at Eleusis. Forty-four comedies ascribed to him were known to Alexandrian scholars (four of these they thought spurious); from the Alexandrian edition(s) eleven complete comedies and some 1000 brief fragments of the lost comedies survive. In competition Aristophanes won at least six first prizes and four second prizes, and only two last-place finishes are attested. After his victory with Frogs in 405, the people voted him an honorific crown of sacred olive for the advice he had given in the parabasis and decreed that the play should have the unique honor of being performed a second time. Aristophanes’ eleven extant plays are: Acharnians (Lenaea 425), Knights (Lenaia 424), Clouds (Dionysia 423; the surviving version is an incomplete and never-staged revision dating from 419-17), Wasps (Lenaea 422), Peace (Dionysia 421), Birds (Dionysia 414), Lysistrata (Lenaea 411), Women at the Thesmophoria (Dionysia 411), Frogs (Lenaea 405), Ecclesiazusae (ca.
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Aristophanes was probably victorious at least once at the City Dionysia, with Babylonians in 426 (IG II2 2325. 58), and at least three times at the Lenaia, with Acharnians in 425, The Knights in 424, and Frogs in 405. His sons Araros, Philippus, and Nicostratus were ... comic poets: Araros is said to have been heavily involved in the production of Wealth II in 388 (test. 1. 54–6) and to have been responsible for the posthumous performances of Aeolosicon II and Cocalus (Cocalus test. iii), with which he seems to have taken the prize at the City Dionysia in 387 (IG II2 2318.
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Although there is something of the real Socrates1 in the character of the same name in the Clouds, it is clear that Aristophanes's depiction of Socrates in the Clouds is in good part a comic distortion. Socrates was a well-known figure in Athens who was popularly perceived as an intellectual. Aristophanes, taking advantage of this popular perception, arbitrarily places him at the head of the Thinkery, in which subjects such as rhetoric and astronomy are taught. As will become evident in the Apology and the Republic, Socrates was not a teacher of rhetoric or any of the other topics taught in the Thinkery. He was not concerned with teaching students to achieve material success through oratory; in fact, his main interest was to encourage young men toward spiritual, not material progress. Despite Socrates's atheism in the Clouds, he was not a scoffer at traditional religion, but a pious believer in the gods.
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In his Symposium, Plato makes Aristophanes deliver a discourse on love, which the latter explains in a sensual manner, but with remarkable originality. At the end of the banquet, Aristodemus, who was one of the guests, fell asleep, "and, as the nights were long, took a good rest. When he was awakened, toward daybreak, by the crowing of cocks, the others were ... asleep or had gone away, and there remained awake only Aristophanes, Agathon and Socrates, who were drinking out of a large goblet that was passed around, while Socrates was discoursing to them. Aristodemus did not hear all the discourse, for he was only half awake; but he remembered Socrates insisting to the other two that the genius of comedy was the same as that of tragedy, and that the writer of the one should also be a writer of the other. To this they were compelled to assent, being sleepy, and not quite understanding what he meant. And first Aristophanes fell asleep, and then, when the day was dawning, Agathon."
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Aristophanes reacted in a similar way to contemporary morality, education and the arts. Although he was fully a part of his own generation and thoroughly versed in its latest fashions, Aristophanes was ... a nostalgic student of the past and thought that Athenian culture had been sounder, grander and stronger in the old days. In Clouds he trenchantly skewers what was hidebound about the old education, and in Frogs he makes telling criticisms of Aeschylus’ tragic art, but we are meant to come away with the feeling that modern educators and artists, like their contemporaries, were not accomplishing what their counterparts in the good old days had accomplished.
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Aristophanes knew the eternal battle: those who were sexually or emotionally abnormal gradually took over the mediating job from the common people (as at Delphi). Those who usurped everyones acces to God presumed to stand between mankind and God -- hands waving with bombast so you don't forget. In time such self-appointed usurpers are promoted from speaking for God to being God's replacement.
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