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Aristophanes

Aristophanes

c. 446 BCE–c. 386 BCE · Athens

Aristophanes (c. 446 - c. 386 BCE) was the greatest comic playwright of classical Athens and the leading figure of what is called "Old Comedy." His surviving plays - among them "The Clouds," "The Birds," "Lysistrata," and "The Frogs" - combine fantastical plots, bawdy humor, and sharp satire of Athenian politicians, intellectuals, and fellow writers. They are our richest source for the comic stage of the period and offer a vivid, irreverent window onto Athenian society during the Peloponnesian War.

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AthensAttica (Greece)

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About Athens

Athens, the capital of Greece since 1834, was the leading intellectual centre of the classical Greek world. Socrates taught there, and four major philosophical schools took root in the city: Plato's Academy, founded around 387 BCE, Aristotle's Lyceum, the Stoa of Zeno, and Epicurus' Garden. Under Hellenistic and Roman rule Athens remained a place of study that drew students from across the empire; in the 4th century CE the Christian writers Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nazianzus studied there together, while Neoplatonist teachers kept lecturing. Emperor Justinian's ban on pagan teaching of philosophy in 529 is generally taken to mark the end of the city's ancient history.

In Athens at the same time

Parmenides, Anaxagoras, Sophocles, Gorgias of Leontini, Herodotus, Euripides

Across the traditions, in Athens at the same time

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In the same place & time

Sages whose lives overlapped with Aristophanes’s in the same cities, drawn from their recorded journeys.

The world in their lifetime

Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Aristophanes’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.

Works(11)