Ancient Greek Literature follows a pleasantly linear path in its early centuries. Our oldest
stories come from Bronze-Age Mycenaean culture and a multigenerational oral tradition, bringing
tales of the Trojan War into Archaic Greece by way of our boy Homer. Soon after him, poets found a
leading role as the creators and performers of the more freewheeling Lyric style. As literature was
always responding to the politics and culture of the times, it makes sense that we see this
more individual focus at a time when City-States became the engines of politics and culture all
across Greece. So we started with Epic, made our way over to Lyric, got us some Sappho, love that,
and then… Athens Happened. In the span of about two centuries, this cultural-lightweight of a
city became the biggest intellectual powerhouse in Greece. It inadvertently inspired the creation
of History, became The place to discuss Philosophy, and pioneered the genre-s
(two of them) of Theater: Tragedy and Comedy. Because truly, only a city as self-obsessedly
dramatic as Athens could single-handedly invent Theater. Athenian Tragedy is a fascinating and
absolutely wild bunch of stories, but today our focus is on Comedy. And, unlike the genre of
Tragedy and their dozens of surviving plays, old Athenian Comedy survives by exclusively
one author: Aristophanes. But fortunately, Aristophanes f*cking rules. So, to see how this
funny-ha-ha-writer-boy satirized his way into Athenian hearts and created possibly the best
portrait of Classical Athenian society ever put to paper (question mark), Let’s do some History.
The exact origins of theater as a genre are tough to pin down. Its earliest recognizable
roots come in the form of song performances reenacting mythical scenes during celebrations
of the god Dionysus since the late 600s, but the concept of theater as a distinct style of
collaborative musical storytelling develops in Athens over the 500s BC, with the first recorded
Actor appearing in 532, and the creation of a dedicated theater festival sometime
between then and the end of the century. The City Dionysia festival was where leading poets in the
city would premiere their tragedies and compete for the glory of Angstiest Playwright. In 487,
the roster of Tragedies and bawdy satyr plays grew to include the newfangled genre of comedy,
which almost nobody took seriously for half a century, before Athens created a dedicated
comedy festival in the 440s called the Lenaia. We’d imagine that it was similar in structure to
the tragedies, but without literally any scripts from this period, we can only guess. Our first
(and only) real look at Old Attic Comedy comes during the Peloponnesian war, where
11 of Aristophanes’ 40+ plays make up the only surviving texts either side of half a century.
Structurally, the first thing we notice is the names of a lot of these plays: Birds, Frogs,
Wasps, Clouds? Knights? Despite the appearance, Aristophanes wasn’t beating Animal Farm to the
punch by two thousand years, but rather, those names are what the chorus is dressed up as in
that particular story. In Aristophanic comedy, the chorus is a central focus and constant presence in
the play: singing, dancing, interacting with the characters, and talking right to the audience.
And with these choral costumes, the sillier the better. Everybody in the city was in attendance,
so any comedian worth his olive oil had to mix high-brow humor and complex lyricism with cartoon
slapstick and just the lowest, crudest jokes that you can imagine. Picture Shakespeare’s balance of
complex satire and dick jokes, but then have all of the actors wearing prosthetic dongs of
hilarious size, and that’s Aristophanes for you. This niche of dirty jokes and vulgar costumes
was already covered by the Satyr plays, but Aristophanes elevated the genre of comedy by
juxtaposing all this obscenity with the absolute spiciest critiques of Athenian
society. While tragedies and satyr plays happen in far off myths and legends, most Aristophanic
comedies are set in contemporary Athens, right in the middle of the Peloponnesian War. Because,
for all its glories and successes, many Athenians would describe their city as
A Hot Mess. The political system of Demokratia was new and shiny, but the assembly was pliable, so
Athenian democracy had a concerning vulnerability to greed, war-mongering, and imperialism. And the
high-minded egalitarianism firmly stopped at Men, because even by the standards of Ancient Greece,
Athens was sexist as hell. Worse yet, these were just the self-inflicted problems from
long before the war with Sparta, which even itself was a bit of an own-goal. What’s most revealing
about Athens in particular is how they were fully aware of what was wrong, as Athenian historians
and philosophers were right alongside Aristophanes in pointing out the many flaws in their society.
By volume, most of the surviving comedies are pure political satire, involving various harebrained
schemes to end the Peloponnesian war. To give you a sense of how absurd these plays get, let
me just take you through the list. Starting with Babylonians (426), he portrays the allies of the
Delian league as slaves grinding at an Athenian mill, and Aristophanes was actually taken to court
by the politician Kleon for slander. Hell of a debut. In Akharnians (425), one farmer attempts to
make a unilateral peace treaty with Sparta just to stop them from burning his farm. Knights (424) was
another attack on Kleon, just two years after getting taken to court for Babylonians. One of
his most famous plays is Clouds (423), portraying the philosopher Socrates as a corrupt sophist and
accused him of profiting off the immoral teaching of persuasion skills to help people cheat their
way out of debts. Wasps (422) satirized the judicial system of the notoriously-litigious
Athenians. An old man is addicted to serving on juries, so his family sets up a fake domestic
court to keep him busy at home, where he judges the case of Dog V Stolen Cheese. After the deaths
of the Athenian Kleon and the Spartan Brasidas, it looked like peace might actually be at hand, so in
421 Aristophanes wrote Peace, where a farmer rides a dung beetle into heaven to rescue the buried
goddess of Peace by digging her out of her grave. The Birds (414) sees an Athenian leave the city
to make a new home in the sky. He inadvertently becomes ruler of a bird kingdom and issues a trade
embargo against the gods, blockading Olympus from receiving their sacrifices in a direct reference
to the devastating Athenian siege of Melos, whereafter the protagonist replaces Zeus as
King of the Gods. Another hugely famous play is Lysistrata (411), where the women of Greece go
on a sex-strike to force the men to make peace. Frogs (405) leaves the Athenian setting for the
underworld, as Dionysus is sad that Euripides recently died, so he goes to Hades to get him
back, but it turns into a poetry contest between Euripides and his tragedian predecessor Aeschylus,
and Dionysus ends up taking Aeschylus back instead. Brutal. Assemblywomen (392) sees the
women of Athens take over the city and make all property communal, which I guess means
Aristophanes invented Communism and did presage Animal Farm by 2,000 years. Wild. And his last
play we have is Plutus (388), where the god of wealth regains his sight and no longer distributes
riches at random, so everyone in Greece starts praying only to him instead of the other gods. His
later plays shift away from satire and towards domestic social comedy — this continues into
Greek New Comedy and culminates in Roman Comedy which is literally just SitCom, and it’s great.
Many of these plays sound patently ridiculous at a glance, but upon inspection they’re even more
insane. For my favorite example, let’s look at Women at the Thesmophoria (411) where a man in
disguise sneaks into the famously women-only festival of the Thesmophoria. The playwright
Euripides thinks that women are plotting to kill him because they hate the sexism in his plays,
so he enlists a friend named Mnesilochus to sneak into this Ancient Magical Women’s Bathroom to
spy on them. To his surprise, he finds the women carrying out an entire parallel society to Athens,
with their own assembly and social organization. During a debate on what to do about Euripides,
Mnesilochus starts making counter accusations, and the women instantly clock him as an impostor. He
grabs a baby as a hostage to aid in his escape, but it turns out to be a disguised cask of wine,
which Mnesilochus continues to threaten with a knife, to the dismay of one woman at the festival
who is clearly an alcoholic. He stabs the vase, and is immediately arrested, after which Euripides
puts on a series of disguises as characters from his own tragedies to eventually charisma-check his
way into freeing Mnesilochus from prison. Having saved his friend and made peace with the women of
Athens, they ride happily into the sunset. This play, like every single play by Aristophanes,
is absolutely buck-f*cking wild, and easily the greatest thing to ever come out of ancient Athens.
Beyond the jokes, Aristophanes’ work reveals Athenian culture on two levels.
One is simply the plays satirizing the people, institutions, and culture of the city. He makes
fun of the politicians, he mocks the court system, he pillories the philosophers; he’s taking highly
specific and well-justified pot-shots at all aspects of life. And that gives us an otherwise
unparalleled look into the actual lived-in world of classical Athens. But what’s most wild is that
Athens allowed this, and even gave him prizes for it. The Athenians knew they were a mess,
and even celebrated it. Comedy like this doesn’t appear anywhere else in ancient Greece,
because only the society that went out of their way to make public participation and
arguing a central fixture of political life could then turn their Important
Religious Theater Festival into a free-for-all satirical slapfest. At the end of the day,
only the rich men were allowed to debate and vote in the Assembly, but by investigating civic life
for an audience of literally the entire city, Aristophanes democratized public discourse more
than anybody else in Athenian history. The man who ruthlessly criticizes democratic politics
is, ironically, perhaps the greatest beneficiary and most zealous advocate of democratic culture.
The historian Thucydides wanted to create a record for all time, but Aristophanes was
focused on his contemporaries, and tapped into a communal understanding of the Athenian world to
tell his stories. He’s not above the history, analytically presenting a grand timeline, but
right in the middle of the city, in the space where big historical arcs come crashing into
the lives of everyday people. If the Spartans are burning down your farms year after year,
who wouldn’t want to strike a one-man peace deal with them, or dream of flying off to literally
anywhere else? Aristophanes brings Athens to life by humanizing the causes and the effects of its
history. In practice, his plays had little lasting effect, as Kleon continued to dominate politics,
Athens never reigned itself in and was eventually defeated by Sparta, and the Sophists continued to
use rhetoric like a weapon. Aristophanes couldn’t save Athens from itself, but even in the course
of his 4-decade career he saw the city pay for its hubris, getting nerfed from the political
center of Greece to ending as its intellectual center, and I don’t think he would’ve been mad!
Aristophanes is a fascinating figure in Greek literature because on the face of
it he doesn’t fit in at all. In a landscape of philosophers, poets, and moody tragedians,
here’s a satirist who’s grace and grossness would inspire comedy from Shakespeare to South Park.
But as we’ve seen, Aristophanes could only have been a product of Athenian culture, not because
Athens was perfect and glorious but because it was so painfully embarrassing it was laughable.
Thank you so much for watching. We don’t ask much of you on this channel,
but as a personal favor to me, please read literally any of Aristophanes plays. Find
one that piques your interest and just Go For it. You’ll instantly understand ancient Athens
So Much Better than you did before, and you’ll laugh your ass off while doing so.
Just find a translation that keeps the dick jokes, and you’re set.