Aristophanes (448–380 BCE) was an ancient Greek comic dramatist whose topics included politics, philosophy, war and peace, the battle of the sexes, and the generational conflict between the old and the young. He is sometimes referred to as the “Father of Comedy;” if he did not invent comedy, he is its earliest consummate practitioner.
Eleven of Aristophanes’s forty plays have survived along with some 1,000 bits of other literary works. Nine of his plays involve the disastrous outcomes of the extended Peloponnesian War with Sparta, which ended in Athens’s defeat and swift decline. Aristophanes’ comic targets included such sacred cows as the Athenian democratic state and the Athenian jury system. With much stinging satire and scorn, he revealed these esteemed institutions and their representatives as less than perfect.
Aristophanes’s plays portray the life of ancient Athens perhaps more realistically than those of any other author did. Little is known of Aristophanes’ life and personality, but much about his times is reflected in his plays. He was a native Athenian. He was the last surviving great fifth-century BCE playwright, and his death ended a century of dramatic achievement.
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Men of sense often learn from their enemies.—It is from their foes, not their friends, that cities learn the lesson of building high walls and ships of war; and this lesson saves their children, their homes, and their properties.
—Aristophanes