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.

In Aristophanes’s Lysistrata and Other Plays, this Aristophanes collection uses comic fantasy to attack war, public folly and the absurdities of Athenian civic life. Terence’s The Comedies places Aristophanes within a narrative shaped by social change and the pressures of ordinary life, family, marriage and personal loyalty, and art, learning and intellectual life.