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.
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