The Eleven Comedies

Summary

The Athenian Society's anonymous translation of 1912 printed every surviving comedy of Aristophanes, eleven plays spanning nearly forty years, from The Acharnians of 425 BC to Plutus of 388 BC. Three of them (The Acharnians, The Clouds and Lysistrata) also appear in the library's Lysistrata and Other Plays; this record treats the whole set and gives most attention to the other eight. Together they are almost all that survives of Old Comedy, the Athenian form in which a chorus could step out of the plot to lecture the audience, living politicians could be mocked by name, and a fantastic idea could be pursued with complete logical seriousness to an absurd conclusion. The early plays belong to the Archidamian War and to the years when Cleon dominated the assembly. In The Knights (424) two slaves of old Demos, the personified Athenian people, find an oracle that their master's tyrannical new steward, the Paphlagonian (a transparent portrait of Cleon), can be ousted only by a still more shameless man; a sausage-seller outbids him in flattery and then, surprisingly, rejuvenates Demos. The Wasps (422) follows Philocleon, an old man so addicted to jury service that his son locks him in the house, stages a mock trial of the family dog, and tries to turn him into a gentleman. In Peace (421) the farmer Trygaeus flies to heaven on a giant dung beetle and, with a chorus of farmers, hauls the goddess Peace out of the pit where War has buried her. The Birds (414), staged as Athens launched the Sicilian expedition, imagines two Athenians who persuade the birds to build Cloud-cuckoo-town between earth and heaven, blockade the gods' sacrifices, and force Zeus to surrender his sovereignty. The Thesmophoriazusae (411) and The Frogs (405) turn to the theatre itself. In the first, Euripides sends a kinsman disguised as a woman into the women's festival that is plotting against him; in the second, Dionysus goes down to Hades to fetch Euripides back, presides instead over a contest between Aeschylus and Euripides in which verses are literally weighed in scales, and returns with Aeschylus as the poet most likely to save the city. The last two plays, written after Athens' defeat, show comedy changing. In the Ecclesiazusae women disguised as men take over the assembly and decree that all property and all sexual partners be held in common, with comic consequences that parallel and probably predate the community of goods in Plato's Republic. In Plutus the blind god of wealth is cured in the temple of Asclepius so that he can give riches only to the just; the chorus shrinks and the political attack softens. The plays are funny, frequently obscene, and serious about peace, justice, the courts, education and the health of a democracy that could laugh at itself in public.

Plot or Argument

• The Acharnians, The Knights and The Clouds

  A farmer makes a private peace with Sparta; a sausage-seller supplants the demagogue Paphlagon as steward of Demos; a debtor enrols his son in Socrates' Thinkery to learn to win bad cases. These are the earliest surviving plays, all aimed at the war party, demagogues and the new education.

• The Wasps: the juror who cannot stop judging

  Bdelycleon imprisons his father Philocleon to cure his mania for the jury courts, debates him on the pay and power of jurors, stages a domestic trial of the dog Labes for stealing cheese, and finally takes him to a drinking party where he behaves outrageously.

• Peace: the rescue of a goddess

  Trygaeus rides a dung beetle to Olympus, finds that the gods have left War to grind the Greek cities in his mortar, and with the farmers of Greece pulls Peace from her pit. He returns to marry Harvest and to drive off arms dealers and oracle-mongers.

• The Birds: Cloud-cuckoo-town

  Pisthetaerus and Euelpides leave litigious Athens, persuade the birds that they were the first rulers of the world, and found a city in the air. Poets, inspectors and decree-sellers arrive to exploit it; Prometheus slips in to advise; and the gods' embassy gives Pisthetaerus the sovereignty of Zeus.

• Lysistrata and The Thesmophoriazusae

  In 411 Aristophanes twice gave women the stage: Lysistrata leads a sex strike to end the war, and the women of the Thesmophoria try Euripides in absentia for slandering them, while his disguised kinsman Mnesilochus is unmasked and rescued through parodies of Euripidean escape plots.

• The Frogs: the contest of the poets

  Dionysus and his slave Xanthias descend to Hades, swapping costumes and beatings on the way. Below, Aeschylus and Euripides compete over prologues, lyrics and the moral use of tragedy; the verses are weighed, and Dionysus chooses Aeschylus to bring back to Athens.

• The Ecclesiazusae and Plutus

  Praxagora and the women pack the assembly in false beards and establish common property and common access in love; then Chremylus has the blind god Wealth healed by Asclepius, upending the economy of gods and men. The chorus shrinks and the satire turns social rather than personal.

Characters

• Demos, the personified Athenian people (The Knights)

  A gullible old master who is flattered by his stewards and finally restored to vigour and judgment.

• Paphlagon and the Sausage-seller, rival stewards (The Knights)

  Cleon in comic disguise and the vulgar huckster who outdoes him in shamelessness.

• Philocleon and Bdelycleon, father and son (The Wasps)

  A jury-mad old democrat and the respectable son who tries every cure on him.

• Trygaeus, vine farmer (Peace)

  The rustic hero who flies to heaven to bring Peace home.

• Pisthetaerus, Athenian schemer (The Birds)

  A persuader who turns the birds into an empire and ends by ruling the gods.

• Dionysus, god of theatre (The Frogs)

  Cowardly, vain and finally a serious judge of what poetry a city needs.

• Aeschylus and Euripides, dead tragedians (The Frogs)

  Rival poets of grandeur and of clever realism, whose contest becomes a debate about education.

• Mnesilochus, kinsman of Euripides (The Thesmophoriazusae)

  Sent in drag to spy on the women's festival, he is caught and must improvise escapes from Euripides' plays.

• Praxagora, leader of the women (The Ecclesiazusae)

  An eloquent organizer who establishes a communal city by vote.

• Chremylus and Cario, farmer and slave (Plutus)

  An honest poor man who restores Wealth's sight, and the impudent servant who narrates the cure.

• Plutus, god of wealth

  Blinded by Zeus so that he cannot tell the just from the unjust.

Lessons

• Flattering the people

  The Knights and The Wasps show a democracy whose citizens are courted with pay and praise by men who profit from their votes. Aristophanes mocks both the flatterers and the flattered, and suggests that a people can be ruled through its own appetites.

  • Why does the Sausage-seller defeat Paphlagon by being worse rather than better?
  • What does Philocleon actually enjoy about jury service?
  • How might a modern audience recognize Demos?

• What poetry is for

  In The Frogs the god of the theatre must decide which dead poet can save a failing city. Aeschylus argues that poets are teachers of men and must present noble examples; Euripides defends making ordinary people think and argue. The choice of Aeschylus is comic but also a judgment about public education.

  • What does each poet accuse the other of doing to Athens?
  • Is weighing verses in a scale a fair test of poetry?
  • What kind of stories does a city need in a crisis?

• Utopias that undo themselves

  Cloud-cuckoo-town and Praxagora's communal Athens are pursued with perfect logic until their consequences become absurd. The plays teach students to test grand schemes by following them all the way through, as Aristophanes does.

  • At what point does each utopia begin to go wrong?
  • Who are the uninvited visitors to Cloud-cuckoo-town, and what do they represent?
  • How does Praxagora's scheme compare with the common life of the guardians in Plato's Republic?

• Wealth that cannot see

  Plutus asks why the wicked prosper and imagines the problem solved by healing a blind god. The play's comedy exposes how much human piety and labour depend on need, a question Scripture also raises in the Psalms and Proverbs.

  • Why, according to Plutus, did Zeus blind him?
  • What happens to the priest of Zeus once everyone is rich?
  • Is poverty an evil, a teacher, or both, as the goddess Poverty argues?

Context

Old Comedy was performed at the Lenaea and the City Dionysia in Athens. Most of these plays were written during the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BC), and their targets are real: Cleon, the jury system and its three-obol pay, the Sicilian expedition, Socrates and the sophists, and Euripides. After the defeat of 404 and the brief oligarchy, comedy grew less personal and its choruses smaller, a shift visible in the last two plays.

Composition

Production dates: The Acharnians 425, The Knights 424, The Clouds 423 (the surviving text is a partial revision), The Wasps 422, Peace 421, The Birds 414, Lysistrata and The Thesmophoriazusae 411, The Frogs 405, The Ecclesiazusae about 392-391 and Plutus 388 BC. The translation was printed privately for the Athenian Society in London in 1912; it is anonymous and frank, with explanatory notes.

Reception

The Frogs won first prize and, according to an ancient tradition, was granted a second performance. Plato portrays Aristophanes as a guest in the Symposium, while his Apology blames The Clouds for prejudice against Socrates. Byzantine schools preserved eleven plays because of their pure Attic Greek, and later satirists from Rabelais to Swift learned from them.

Comparisons

• Lysistrata and Other Plays

  That volume isolates three plays from this collection; read beside the other eight, its sex strike and private peace look like one move in a long campaign for peace that runs from The Acharnians through Peace.

• The History of the Peloponnesian War

  Thucydides gives Cleon's Mytilene speech and the Sicilian debate; The Knights and The Birds show the same assembly from the comic stage, and the two sources check each other.

• The Republic

  Praxagora's common property and common families anticipate Book V of the Republic; whether Plato answered Aristophanes or both drew on current talk is uncertain, but the comic version tests the idea by its kitchen-table consequences.

• The Trojan Women and Other Plays

  Read Euripides' own plays before The Frogs and The Thesmophoriazusae to see what Aristophanes parodies and to judge whether his complaint about Euripides is fair.

• Prometheus Bound and Other Plays

  In The Frogs Euripides mocks Aeschylus's silent heroes and long choral songs; The Persians and Prometheus Bound show exactly the grandeur the comedy honours and teases.

• Gulliver's Travels

  Swift's flying island of Laputa and Aristophanes' Cloud-cuckoo-town both put schemers in the air to satirize projects cut off from ordinary life.

Quotes

Medical Lens

Two scenes matter for the history of medicine. In The Wasps the household tries a sequence of religious cures on Philocleon's jury mania: purification, Corybantic rites and a night of incubation in the temple of Asclepius on Aegina. In Plutus the slave Cario narrates an incubation at the Asclepieion in comic detail: purification in the sea, offerings, sleep in the temple, the god's rounds with mortar and pestle, a stinging eye salve, and the sacred snakes that restore Wealth's sight. The scene is satire, but it matches what is known of Asclepian temple practice. Calling Philocleon's passion a mania is the play's own joke, not a diagnosis.

• The Wasps, prologue

  Xanthias lists Philocleon's symptoms (sleeplessness, dreams of the water-clock, fingers pinched as if holding a ballot) and the failed cures, ending with incubation at the temple of Asclepius.

  Obsession Monomania Ancient Medicine
• Plutus, Cario's report to the wife

  A detailed comic account of a night in the temple of Asclepius: the priest collecting offerings, Iaso and Panacea attending, a garlic-and-vinegar salve for Neoclides, and the snakes licking Plutus's eyes.

  Ancient Medicine Physicians Doctors

Creative Prompts

• Dialogue

  Write the trial of the dog Labes from The Wasps as a modern courtroom sketch, keeping Philocleon's eagerness to convict.

• Classroom

  Hold your own version of the contest in The Frogs: choose two poets the class has read, weigh one line from each, and have a student Dionysus explain the verdict.

• Fiction

  Write a diary entry by a new citizen of Cloud-cuckoo-town in its first week, after the poets, inspectors and decree-sellers have come and gone.

• Essay

  Old Comedy mocked named politicians to their faces. Argue whether that freedom strengthened or weakened Athenian democracy, using The Knights and The Wasps.

Further Reading

• The History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides

  The war behind most of these plays.

• Symposium, Plato

  Aristophanes speaks on love in Plato's dialogue.

• Apology, Plato

  Socrates names the comic poets among his old accusers.

• The Republic, Plato

  Book V on common property and families.