Five-minute digest
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.
Top 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.
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.
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.
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.
Verified Quotes
“Such is his madness, and all advice is useless; he only judges the more each day”
“This is the city of Nephelococcygia, Cloud-cuckoo-town”
“Poetry is to be weighed in the scales”
“Zeus inflicted it on me, because of his jealousy of mankind”
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.
- 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.