Aristophanes

Aristophanes was an Athenian comic playwright active during the Peloponnesian War. His surviving plays satirise politicians, philosophers, military policy and the strains of prolonged war, often using fantasy and obscenity to expose civic anxieties.

Aristophanes competed repeatedly at the major Athenian dramatic festivals and used Old Comedy to attack public figures and policies during the Peloponnesian War. Eleven of his plays survive complete, making him the principal surviving representative of the genre.

Lysistrata and Other Plays presents Aristophanes through his own surviving comedy rather than as a character in somebody else’s narrative. The collection shows him using fantasy, obscenity, song and political caricature to attack war, civic vanity and public folly in classical Athens, with Lysistrata turning a women’s sex strike into an outrageous argument against the continuation of the Peloponnesian War.