page_title: Aristophanes
section_title: Poetry
hierarchical_section_title: Aristophanes / Biography / Poetry
caption_attribution_description: English: Musa reading a volumen (scroll), at the left an open chest. Attic red-figure lekythos, ca. 435-425 BC. From Boeotia. Français&#160;: Muse lisant un volumen (rouleau)&#160;; à gauche, un coffre ouvert. Lécythe attique à figures rouges, v. 435-425 av. J.-C. Provenance&#160;: Béotie.
context_page_description: Aristophanes, son of Philippus, of the deme Kydathenaion, was a comic playwright or comedy-writer of ancient Athens and a poet of Old Attic Comedy. Eleven of his forty plays survive virtually complete. These provide the most valuable examples of a genre of comic drama known as Old Comedy and are used to define it, along with fragments from dozens of lost plays by Aristophanes and his contemporaries.
  Also known as "The Father of Comedy" and "the Prince of Ancient Comedy", Aristophanes has been said to recreate the life of ancient Athens more convincingly than any other author. His powers of ridicule were feared and acknowledged by influential contemporaries; Plato singled out Aristophanes' play The Clouds as slander that contributed to the trial and subsequent condemning to death of Socrates, although other satirical playwrights had also caricatured the philosopher.
  Aristophanes' second play, The Babylonians, was denounced by Cleon as a slander against the Athenian polis.
context_section_description: The language of Aristophanes' plays, and in Old Comedy generally, was valued by ancient commentators as a model of the Attic dialect. The orator Quintilian believed that the charm and grandeur of the Attic dialect made Old Comedy an example for orators to study and follow, and he considered it inferior in these respects only to the works of Homer. A revival of interest in the Attic dialect may have been responsible for the recovery and circulation of Aristophanes' plays during the 4th and 5th centuries AD, resulting in their survival today. In Aristophanes' plays, the Attic dialect is couched in verse and his plays can be appreciated for their poetic qualities.
  For Aristophanes' contemporaries the works of Homer and Hesiod formed the cornerstones of Hellenic history and culture. Thus poetry had a moral and social significance that made it an inevitable topic of comic satire. Aristophanes was very conscious of literary fashions and traditions and his plays feature numerous references to other poets. These include not only rival comic dramatists such as Eupolis and Hermippus and predecessors such as Magnes, Crates and Cratinus, but also tragedians, notably Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, all three of whom are mentioned in e.g. The Frogs. Aristophanes was the equal of these great tragedians in his subtle use of lyrics. He appears to have modelled his approach to language on that of Euripides in particular, so much so that the comic dramatist Cratinus labelled him a 'Euripidaristophanist' addicted to hair-splitting niceties.
  A full appreciation of Aristophanes' plays requires an understanding of the poetic forms he employed with virtuoso skill, and of their different rhythms and associations. There were three broad poetic forms: iambic dialogue, tetrameter verses and lyrics:
  Iambic dialogue: Aristophanes achieves an effect resembling natural speech through the use of the iambic trimeter (corresponding to the effects achieved by English poets such as Shakespeare using iambic pentameters). His realistic use of the meter makes it ideal for both dialogue and soliloquy, as for instance in the prologue, before the arrival of the Chorus, when the audience is introduced to the main issues in the plot. The Acharnians opens with these three lines by the hero, Dikaiopolis (rendered here in English as iambic pentameters):
  How many are the things that vex my heart!
  Pleasures are few, so very few — just four -
  But stressful things are manysandthousandsandheaps!
  Here Aristophanes employs a frequent device, arranging the syntax so that the final word in a line comes as a comic climax. The hero's pleasures are so few he can number them (τέτταρα, four) but his causes for complaint are so many they beggar numerical description and he must invent his own word for them (ψαμμακοσιογάργαρα, literally "sandhundredheaps", here paraphrased "manysandthousandsandheaps"). The use of invented compound words is another comic device frequently found in the plays.
  Tetrameter catalectic verses: These are long lines of anapests, trochees or iambs (where each line is ideally measured in four dipodes or pairs of feet), used in various situations within each play such as:
  formal debates or agons between characters (typically in anapestic rhythm);
  excited dialogue or heated argument (typically trochaic rhythm, the same as in early tragedy);
  long speeches declaimed by the Chorus in parabases (in either anapestic or trochaic rhythms);
  informal debates barely above the level of ordinary dialogue (typically iambic).
  Anapestic rhythms are naturally jaunty (as in many limericks) and trochaic meter is suited to rapid delivery (the word "trochee" is in fact derived from trechein, "to run", as demonstrated for example by choruses who enter at speed, often in aggressive mood) However, even though both these rhythms can seem to "bowl along" Aristophanes often varies them through use of complex syntax and substituted meters, adapting the rhythms to the requirements of serious argument. In an anapestic passage in The Frogs, for instance, the character Aeschylus presents a
caption: Muse reading, Louvre
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