Aristophanes: The First Poet Critic

In the words of German poet Heinrich Heine: “There is a God, and his name is Aristophanes.”

Introduction

Aristophanes (c. 446 BC-380 BC) is the greatest of the classical comedians. His surviving plays are considered the high-water mark of ancient comedy and are filled with sensualism, blasphemy, and ridicule. Aristophanes, as Leo Strauss aptly said of him, was a reactionary. But he was also a modernist. In fact, reaction and modernity often occur together. Moreover, Aristophanes was the first outright social and literary critic the Western world ever produced—his plays being elongated, if not all so subtle, commentaries on Greek society, contemporary events, and literature.

Aristophanes’ Life and Epoch

While the playwrights prior to Aristophanes lived in exciting and transformative times, Aristophanes’ career spanned the apogee of Athenian power and degeneracy. His early years coincided with the turbulence of war and tyranny. And by the time of his death, formal philosophy was taking shape, with the rise of Socrates and Plato. In some sense, Aristophanes also lived through exciting, as well as turbulent, times. Although satirized by Plato in Symposium, Aristophanes was friends with Socrates, and he was respected by Socrates and Plato. Aristophanes, like Socrates (and Plato), was an opponent of the demagogues and sophists; however, Aristophanes was also a stalwart defender of the necessity of poetry and mythology (as I’ve written concerning understanding Plato’s Symposium).

While Sophocles and Euripides also lived through the turbulence of the Peloponnesian War and the fall of Athenian democracy, Aristophanes was too young to remember the glory days of Athens, and his formative years took place under the tyranny of Cleon, the trials and tribulations of war, and the defeat of Athens by the Peloponnesian coalition. It was in the sorrow and sad trials of war that Aristophanes’ comedy, social and political criticism, was born. Part of Aristophanes’ literary efforts, then, was aimed at understanding how Athens had fallen into conflict and dissolution.