Aristophanes
Greece
Ribald, punning, fantastical: political attack disguised as absurd spectacle, obscenity and civic seriousness delivered in the same breath.
Aristophanes wrote and staged comedies through the decades of the Peloponnesian War, using the annual festival competitions as a platform for open political attack, mocking living generals, demagogues, and playwrights by name while the city watched.
Lysistrata (411 BCE), staged as the war ground into its twentieth year, has the women of Athens and Sparta stage a sex strike to force their husbands to make peace: an absurd premise handled with real fury at the war's waste. His other surviving plays skewer everything from Socratic philosophy (The Clouds) to Euripides' own tragedies (The Frogs).
Eleven of his roughly forty comedies survive, the only complete examples of Old Comedy that remain, making him the sole window onto an entire vanished genre.
Lines of influence
No descendants recorded, yet.
Their books in the atlas
- 411 BCE
LysistrataLvl 4comedy
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