Aristophanes

Aristophanes' first comedy was produced in 427 and his last in 386 or soon thereafter. 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 one thousand 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 recorded. After his victory with Frogs in 405, the people voted to give 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. The success of Aristophanes' first three plays established him as a major new talent. That Aristophanes entrusted their production to friends instead of producing them himself (a practice that he followed frequently throughout his career) evoked early criticism from rival comic poets. Since Aristophanes was not the only comic poet to do this, his rivals' criticism may have been motivated by envy of the young poet's brilliant start. Nevertheless, in Knights and Wasps Aristophanes reacted defensively to this criticism, explaining that, as a fledgling comic playwright, he had too much respect for the difficulties of the craft to leap into it unprepared; instead he had learned his craft in a careful apprenticeship, seeking the advice, patronage, and assistance of knowledgeable friends. For this research paper, you may need to study Aristophanes' works. His first play, the lost Banqueters, produced in 427 B.C., examined the effects of the "new education" on his own generation. A traditional-minded landowner, who joins his friends (the chorus) for a banquet honoring Herakles, has two sons, the Virtuous Boy and the Buggered Boy. The former has had the traditional athletic-musical education, while the latter has dropped out of school to learn the new techniques for success in the assembly and law courts that were being taught by Sophists such as Thrasymachos and used by ambitious young politicians such as Alkibiades. As a result the Buggered Boy has abandoned traditional rural virtues for an urbane life of self-indulgence and troublemaking.

The outcome of this allegorical contest of lives is not preserved, but, to judge from the poet's similar treatment of this theme in Clouds I (423), the new education was probably depicted as amoral and as a major threat to the social and political well-being of Athens. Aristophanes' second play, the lost Babylonians, produced in 426, criticized the administration of the Athenian empire by Kleon and other officials, the self-interest of their counterparts in the allied cities, and the gullibility of the Athenian Assembly when listening to the reports of allied ambassadors. The chorus, composed of tattooed slaves toiling in a mill, may have represented the beleaguered inhabitants of the allied cities, some of whom must have attended the play, since it was produced at the Dionysia festival. Lysistrata (411), produced at the Lenaia, introduced the first comic heroine, for whom the play is named. Lysistrata is an Athenian woman who succeeds in forcing a negotiated peace by persuading the young wives of the combatant states to abandon their domestic and sexual duties until their warrior husbands stop fighting; meanwhile, the older Athenian women occupy the Akropolis to prevent the warmongering politicians from withdrawing money from its treasuries. By using women, who had no part in political or military life, as his plotters and by eschewing the usual finger-pointing, Aristophanes could attack the war in a nonpartisan way and avoid arousing dangerous passions. We may offer you a custom essay focusing on Lysistrata, with its combination of ribald gaiety and earnest idealism.