Greek comic poet.

One knows almost nothing of his life, if not that it obtained several times the first place in the contests of poetry and that the attacks which it conducted, in particular in its comedy the Knights (424 av. J. - C.), against the Cléon demagog to him attracted a lawsuit where, marked to have usurped the rights of citizen, it was recognized innocent. He seems to have belonged to the rural, enemy democracy of the urban demagogy at the time of the Peloponnesian War.

He represents, par excellence, the old comedy, left review of the events, initially political, of the year, with virulent personal attacks and coarse caricatures. As in the Greek tragedy, the chorus, whose characters are disguised here out of frogs, birds, in wasps, etc, a crucial role plays there, either by singing the parabase, great central lyric piece, or while mixing with the action, or finally while being addressed directly to the spectator.

The work of Aristophane was composed of 44 comedies, played between 427 and 390 av. J. - C.; eleven to only are us whole parvenues. With an astonishing boldness, Aristophane attacks with all, the institutions, the political acts, the private individuals, the statesmen and even the gods. In Acharniens (425 av. J. - C.), Peace (421), Lysistrata (411), pleas in favor of peace, it protests against the partisans of the Peloponnesian War which was to ruin Athens.

The Wasps (422) denounce the stupidity of the Athenian people, which spend his time giving judgments and neglect the important business. The Frogs (405) are directed against Euripide, whose tragedies (according to Aristophane), contrary to those of Eschyle, corrupted the taste and morals.

In the Clouds (423), he makes fun philosophy of Socrate, presented like the most dangerous sophist; the Parliament of the women (392) is a critic of the communist theories and feminist settings with the mode by the sophists. He imagines, in the Birds (414), an ideal city, built between the sky and the ground by the birds, free of the political disadvantages of the terrestrial cities, and whose access is allowed to the same gods only under certain conditions. Also let us quote the Festivals of Déméter (411) and Ploutos or Plutus (408-388).  

Its ideal, represented by Athens of the medic wars, of Marathon, makes of it the irreducible adversary of all the political innovations, morals, nuns, arts persons. It is what explains its unjust attacks against Socrate, that it compares to the sophists and of which it ignores spirituality, or against the tragic poet Euripide, which it reproaches for giving up the noble simplicity of his predecessors.