Aristophanes was from the deme of Cydathenaia. He was born in about 445, and his death is placed somewhere between 390 and 380. He was credited by the Alexandrian scholars with forty plays, and of these eleven have come down to us. He repeatedly came face to face with his contemporary Eupolis, who beat him to the first prize with the play Flatterers, Aristophanes having to be content with second prize for his play Peace. Aristophanes' main themes derive from the problems that beset Athens during the Peloponnesian War. We can epitomize them as: peace, the rule of the demos, new philosophical ideas, and a social, economic and moral critique of Athenian society. Thucydides, too, dealt with the same themes; but we need only compare his treatment of, for example, Cleon with that by Aristophanes to see the difference between the two. Thucydides was writing for posterity, Aristophanes for his contemporaries. |
What were Aristophanes' politics? It is a question which, naturally enough, has repeatedly engaged scholars, of all shades of opinion. If one compares Aristophanes' plays with other writing of the time, one finds that his themes were ones that were being discussed, and that each writer looked at them in his own way, this surely represented a range of views in society at large.
Comedy - like tragedy - catered to the educational nature of the theatre and its transcendental role. To do this, in other words to put forward problems so that they could be appreciated and resolved, comedy stated them in an extreme form. This should make us cautious about pinpointing Aristophanes' political beliefs. It comes through clearly from his plays that he thought of the Peloponnesian War as catastrophic; of Cleon as a public menace; of the future of the rule of the demos as beset with problems. How far he was in favour of oligarchy and opposed to new philosophical trends, must remain uncertain. |
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