Aristophanes

Aristophanes is the only writer of Athenian Old Comedy whose plays survive, and eleven of about forty are extant. Born around 446 BC, he began producing in his early twenties and wrote through the Peloponnesian War and its aftermath. Old Comedy attacked living people by name with a freedom no later society permitted. He mocked Cleon, then the most powerful politician in Athens, so severely in the Knights of 424 BC that no craftsman would make the mask, and Aristophanes is said to have played the part himself with his face smeared with wine lees; Cleon prosecuted him twice. The Clouds of 423 BC portrays Socrates suspended in a basket studying the heavens and running a school that teaches how to argue the weaker case into the stronger. Plato has Socrates say at his trial that this caricature had done more damage than the formal charges. Lysistrata of 411 BC has the women of Greece refuse sex until their husbands make peace, and it is the best known of the anti-war plays, along with the Acharnians and Peace. He wrote them while the war was being fought and lost, in a city that permitted their performance. The Frogs of 405 BC stages a contest in the underworld between Aeschylus and Euripides over who should be brought back to save the city. His work is obscene, formally inventive, and full of political detail that is now the principal source for a great deal of Athenian daily life. He appears in Plato's Symposium. He died around 386 BC.

• Lived: 446 BCE – 386 BCE
• Nationality: Greek
• Roles: writer, painter