Aristophanes

11 works in the library, 2 with an English translation.

Classical Athenian comic playwright, born at Classical Athens. From Wikidata; Wikipedia.

Lived: 5th–4th c. BC
Kinds of writing: Comedy (11)
Dialect: Attic
Analysed: 114,709 words

The 11 works

First the work Aristophanes is best known for; then the works here with a translation and the most familiar vocabulary: the fewest rare words to look up. That is vocabulary only; grammar, dialect and ideas may still be demanding.

CloudsΝεφέλαιStart hereEnglish70% common wordsAbout
BirdsὌρνιθεςStart hereEnglish66% common wordsAbout
AcharniansἈχαρνῆςGreek only66% common wordsAbout
KnightsἹππῆςGreek only69% common wordsAbout
WaspsΣφῆκεςGreek only68% common wordsAbout
PeaceΕἰρήνηGreek only67% common wordsAbout
LysistrataΛυσιστράτηGreek only69% common wordsAbout
ThesmophoriazusaeΘεσμοφοριάζουσαιGreek only68% common wordsAbout
FrogsΒάτραχοιGreek only66% common wordsAbout
EcclesiazusaeἘκκλησιάζουσαιGreek only71% common wordsAbout
WealthΠλοῦτοςGreek only73% common wordsAbout

The road of the text

Follow the text from Aristophanes's own day to the book in your hands. The gaps are the long silences between one mark and the next.

Before you read. Little numbers like ¹ are footnotes. Tap one and it jumps to the source at the bottom of the page, so you can check us. Debated among scholars The evidence allows more than one reading, and specialists disagree. Ancient tradition / legend This is what ancient writers told; it may not be what happened. No label? Then the sources simply state it as fact.

The author
Readers
Copies
Print and editions

c. 446 BCThe authorBorn at Athens, about 446 BC¹
about 19 years later427 BCThe authorHis first play, the Banqueters (lost), wins second prize at the City Dionysia¹
1 year later426 BCThe authorThe Babylonians (lost); Cleon denounces it as slander against the city^1,4,5
1 year later425 BCThe authorAcharnians, produced by Callistratus, wins first prize at the Lenaia⁵
1 year later424 BCThe authorKnights, his attack on Cleon and the first play he directed himself, wins first prize at the Lenaia^1,9
1 year later423 BCThe authorClouds comes last of three at the City Dionysia¹²
1 year later422 BCThe authorWasps, at the Lenaia¹⁶
1 year later421 BCThe authorPeace wins second prize, days before the Peace of Nicias¹⁷
about 3 years laterc. 418 BCThe authorThe Clouds is partly revised, probably between 421 and 416 BC; this revised text is the one that survives¹² Debated among scholars
about 4 years later414 BCThe authorBirds wins second prize at the City Dionysia¹⁸
3 years later411 BCThe authorLysistrata (Lenaia) and Women at the Thesmophoria^20,22
6 years later405 BCThe authorFrogs wins first prize at the Lenaia, and is later given a second performance^1,23
6 years later399 BCReadersSocrates is tried and put to death; in Plato's Apology he blames the Clouds for old prejudice against him^12,14
about 7 years laterc. 392 BCThe authorAssemblywomen (392 or 391 BC)^1,30
about 4 years later388 BCThe authorWealth, his last surviving play³¹
about 2 years laterc. 386 BCThe authorDies, about 386 BC¹
about 490 years laterc. AD 100CopiesA roll of a comedy, probably his, is copied in the first or second century AD; three scraps of it are found at Oxyrhynchus in 1897³⁵
about 850 years laterc. AD 950CopiesThe Ravenna manuscript, the oldest with all eleven plays, is written in the mid-tenth century³⁶
about 470 years later1423CopiesGiovanni Aurispa brings the Ravenna manuscript to Niccolò Niccoli in Florence³⁶
75 years later1498Print and editionsFirst printed edition (Aldus Manutius, Venice, edited by Marcus Musurus): nine plays, with the ancient notes³⁸
about 17 years laterc. 1515Print and editionsLysistrata and Women at the Thesmophoria first printed, in Florence by the Giunti (1515 or 1516)^36,39
about 390 years later1906Print and editionsThe revised edition of Hall and Geldart's Oxford Classical Text (1906–07), the Greek text in the reader^40,42
about 100 years later2007Print and editionsN. G. Wilson's new Oxford Classical Text⁴⁰

Life and work

Checked against sources · 2 October 2026

Aristophanes was an Athenian, the son of Philippus, from the district (deme) of Kydathenaion. He was born about 446 BC and died about 386 BC.¹ He wrote some forty comedies. Eleven survive almost complete, and of the rest nearly a thousand fragments remain.^1,2 They matter all the more because they are all we have: the only complete plays of Athens' Old Comedy that survive are his, and every other Old Comedy poet is known only from fragments and reports.³

Old Comedy was loud, political and very rude. Living Athenians were mocked by name, from politicians to poets, and the chorus, twenty-four strong, sang, danced and took part in the plot; eight of the eleven surviving plays are named after their chorus.^1,3 At a point called the parabasis the chorus turns to the audience and speaks for the poet. In the Clouds it begins «ὦ θεώμενοι», “Spectators, I will freely declare to you the truth”.^7,12

A young poet and a powerful enemy

His first play, the Banqueters, won second prize at the City Dionysia in 427 BC; it is lost.¹ His first three plays were directed not by him but by Callistratus and Philoneides, and he went on using them for some later plays too.¹ In the Clouds he looks back on that first play in a strange image: “I was still a virgin, and it was not lawful for me as yet to have children”, so he “exposed my offspring, and another girl took it up”.⁷

Debated among scholars Those lines have been read as a sign that he was very young, no more than about eighteen, when the Banqueters was staged.¹

His second play, the Babylonians (also lost), showed the cities of Athens' empire as slaves grinding at a mill, and it was staged at the City Dionysia, with foreign visitors in the audience.^1,5 Cleon, the pro-war populist politician, denounced it as slander against the city.^1,9 A year later the hero of the Acharnians remembers what Cleon did to him over “last year's comedy” (our translation): he dragged him into the council chamber and nearly destroyed him with lies.⁴ Whether the real target was Aristophanes or his producer Callistratus is not certain.⁵ Either way the hero is careful: the men he attacks are «κοὐχὶ τὴν πόλιν λέγω», “and I don't mean the city” (our translation, Acharnians 515).¹

The Acharnians (425 BC) won first prize at the Lenaia festival.⁵ Its hero wants peace, so he hands over eight drachmas and has a peace treaty made “with the Spartans for me alone, and for my children and my wife” (our translation).⁶ The next year Aristophanes produced the Knights himself, the first of many plays he directed, and it won first prize at the Lenaia in 424.^1,9 The chorus explains why he had waited so long: “the author-director of comedies has the hardest job of all”.^1,8

The Knights is a sustained attack on Cleon. He appears as a slave of old Demos (“the People”), a newly bought Paphlagonian tanner.^9,11 He is never named, and he does not even look like Cleon: “for fear, none of the mask-makers was willing to make his likeness; still, he will be recognised: the audience is clever” (our translation).^9,10 Years later the poet boasted that he “struck Cleon in the belly when at the height of his power”.⁷

The Clouds and Socrates

The Clouds was staged at the City Dionysia in 423 BC and came last of the three plays that competed. One of the two plays that beat it, Ameipsias' Connus, also made fun of Socrates.¹² In Aristophanes' play an old man, Strepsiades, sunk in debt, goes to Socrates' school, the “thinking-shop” of the reader's translation, to learn the arguments that will beat his creditors in court. He finds the philosopher hanging in a basket: “Why callest thou me, thou creature of a day?” And what is he doing up there? «ἀεροβατῶ καὶ περιφρονῶ τὸν ἥλιον», “I am walking in the air, and speculating about the sun.”¹³

Aristophanes thought it his best play. In the revised parabasis he tells the audience that he had judged them “to be clever spectators, and this to be the cleverest of my comedies”, and that he “retired from the contest defeated by vulgar fellows, though I did not deserve it”.⁷

The joke had a long life. In 399 BC Socrates was tried and put to death, and in Plato's Apology he tells the jury that the prejudice against him goes back to things they had seen “in Aristophanes’ comedy, a Socrates being carried about there, proclaiming that he was treading on air and uttering a vast deal of other nonsense”.¹⁴ Plato seems to have counted the play among the causes of the trial, and some modern scholars agree. Others point out that Aristophanes' plays rarely changed public opinion, and that the trial came many years after the play, after Athens' defeat by Sparta.¹²

War, peace, birds and women

The Wasps followed at the Lenaia in 422, with a chorus of old jurymen; Cleon died soon after.¹⁶ The Peace won second prize at the City Dionysia of 421, a few days before the Peace of Nicias promised to end the ten-year war. Its hero flies up to the gods on a giant dung beetle, and Cleon is mocked again, though he had been killed in battle a few months before.¹⁷

The Birds (City Dionysia, 414, second prize) is his longest surviving play.¹⁸ An Athenian, Pisthetaerus, persuades the birds to build a great city in the sky, and the name chosen for it is «Νεφελοκοκκυγίαν»: “Do you like Nephelococcygia?” In English it is usually Cloudcuckooland.^18,19

In 411 came two plays about women. In Lysistrata, first staged at the Lenaia, the women of the warring cities go on a sex strike and take over the Acropolis to force the men to make peace.²⁰ Lysistrata puts it plainly: «εἴπερ μέλλομεν ἀναγκάσειν τοὺς ἄνδρας εἰρήνην ἄγειν», “if we are going to force the men to keep the peace” (our translation).²¹ Women at the Thesmophoria, probably staged at the City Dionysia, sends Euripides' elderly in-law (never named in the play; the ancient list of characters calls him Mnesilochus), disguised as a woman, to spy on a women's festival; how it fared in the competition is unknown.²²

The Frogs

Euripides had died not long before. In the Frogs, which won first prize at the Lenaia in 405 BC, the god of the theatre, Dionysus, goes down to the underworld to bring him back.²³ «δέομαι ποιητοῦ δεξιοῦ», he explains: “I need a clever poet: some are gone, and those still here are bad” (our translation).²⁴ On the way he is serenaded by a chorus of frogs: «βρεκεκεκὲξ κοὰξ κοάξ».²⁵

Below, he finds Euripides jealous of Aeschylus' place as the greatest tragic poet, and in the end he decides to take back the poet who will give the city the best advice.^23,27,28 At the last moment he takes Aeschylus, with a line that turns Euripides' own words against him: «ἡ γλῶττʼ ὀμώμοκʼ, Αἰσχύλον δʼ αἱρήσομαι», “my tongue has sworn, but I will choose Aeschylus” (our translation).²⁸ The first half is a quotation from Euripides' Hippolytus: «ἡ γλῶσσ’ ὀμώμοχ’, ἡ δὲ φρὴν ἀνώμοτος», “My tongue an oath did take, but not my heart.”^29,47

The Frogs also had a political message. In its parabasis the chorus asks the city to make its citizens equal again and to pardon those who had gone astray: «ἄτιμόν φημι χρῆναι μηδένʼ εἶνʼ ἐν τῇ πόλει», “no one in the city should be disfranchised” (our translation).²⁶ The Frogs won the unique honour of a second performance at a later festival.¹ An ancient summary (hypothesis) of the play reports, from the writer Dicaearchus, that this was “because of the parabasis”.²⁷

After the war

Comedy changed after Athens' defeat. His last two plays, Assemblywomen (about 392 or 391 BC), in which the women of Athens take over the government, and Wealth (388 BC), are seen as early examples of Middle Comedy rather than Old.^1,30,31 His son Araros was also a comic poet. He may have helped to produce Wealth, and he is thought to have put on two of his father's plays after his death.¹

Plato puts Aristophanes at the dinner party of the Symposium, though how far that is evidence for the real man is doubtful.¹ He arrives at his turn to speak with a hiccough, and has to hand over to the doctor Eryximachus until a course of sneezing cures it.³² His speech is the famous fable of the first humans, who were cut in two: “Each of us, then, is but a tally of a man, since every one shows like a flat-fish the traces of having been sliced in two”.³³ Later in the evening Alcibiades describes Socrates “to use a phrase of yours, Aristophanes”, with a line taken from the Clouds: “strutting like a proud marsh-goose, with ever a side-long glance”.^1,34

Ancient tradition / legend An epitaph for Aristophanes said to be by Plato compares the poet's soul to an everlasting shrine of the Graces.¹

How the words reached us

Manuscripts & transmission

Passed from hand to hand

Papyri. His plays were still being copied in Roman Egypt. At Oxyrhynchus in 1897 Grenfell and Hunt found three scraps of a comedy that is probably by Aristophanes, from a roll copied in the first or second century AD; they are now in the British Library.³⁵ Wilson's Oxford edition lists, before each play, the papyri it uses with their dates, alongside the medieval manuscripts.⁴⁰

The Ravenna manuscript. The oldest book with all eleven plays is the Ravenna manuscript (Ravennas 429, in the Biblioteca Classense), written in the mid-tenth century. For the whole of Women at the Thesmophoria, and about a quarter of Lysistrata, it is the only medieval witness: every other copy was made from it. Giovanni Aurispa brought it to Florence in 1423; in 1712 it was taken from Pisa to the monastery of Classe at Ravenna.³⁶ It is still checked today: the Oxford editor N. G. Wilson used a facsimile of it to correct readings that earlier editors had reported wrongly.⁴⁰

Three plays for school. In Byzantine schools a smaller selection of three plays was read: Wealth, Clouds and Frogs, the Byzantine "triad". These were copied often and loaded with ancient and medieval notes (scholia); the other plays were copied less often.³⁷ Women at the Thesmophoria is known only from the Ravenna manuscript and its copies.³⁶

Print. In July 1498 Aldus Manutius printed at Venice the first edition of nine plays (Wealth, Clouds, Frogs, Knights, Acharnians, Wasps, Birds, Peace and Assemblywomen), edited by the Cretan scholar Marcus Musurus. The Greek text stands in the centre of the page, with the scholia that Musurus compiled from the ancient commentators.³⁸ The two missing plays, Lysistrata and Women at the Thesmophoria, were first printed by the Giunti in Florence, using the Ravenna manuscript. Our two sources disagree on the year, 1515 or 1516.^36,39

Modern texts. For a century the Oxford Classical Text was F. W. Hall and W. M. Geldart's (first published in 1900, revised in 1906–07; the reader uses the revised text).^40,42 In 2007 N. G. Wilson replaced it with a new Oxford text, based on a fairly small number of chosen manuscripts.⁴⁰

Textual variants

Where the copies disagree

Who says which line? Deciding which character speaks each line is one of the hardest jobs for an editor of Aristophanes. Papyri and manuscripts are of little or no help, and opinions can differ widely with no way to settle them.⁴⁰

Debated among scholars The Clouds we read is a second draft. No copy of the play staged in 423 survives. What we have is a partial revision, which was afterwards circulated in written copies.¹² The clues are in the parabasis. It complains that the first version failed,⁷ and it mentions Eupolis' Maricas (staged in 421) and attacks on the politician Hyperbolus, who was ostracised in about 416 (the year is uncertain). That puts the revision somewhere between about 421 and 416 BC.^7,12 Yet the same parabasis still urges the audience to “convict the cormorant Cleon of bribery and embezzlement”, though Cleon died in 422. So that part must be left over from 423, and the revision was only partial.^12,15

Debated among scholars Three lines too many? Near the end of the Clouds there are three lines in which old Strepsiades admits that his son “seems to speak justly” (Clouds 1437–1439). Wilson's 2007 text removes these three lines as a later addition, something nobody seems to have suspected before.^40,41 The reader's text, Hall and Geldart's, prints them.⁴¹

Is the text as sound as it looks? Aristophanes' text is often said to be better preserved than that of the tragic poets. Wilson argues that critics who defend every word of the manuscripts forget “the deterioration of texts” over almost two thousand years of copying by hand. His reviewer in BMCR agreed that the text is not in as good a state as many believe.⁴⁰

Debated among scholars A song in the wrong place? In the Wasps, some editors swap the second parabasis (lines 1265–1291) with the later song praising the son's devotion to his father (1450–1473).¹⁶

Debated among scholars When was the Frogs restaged? The ancient summary says only that the play was honoured with a second production, not that it came the next year. Sommerstein has argued that it was in 404, and was used by the oligarchs who seized power that year (the Thirty) against the politician Cleophon.²⁷

Books to read it in

F. W. Hall and W. M. Geldart, Aristophanis Comoediae, 2 vols (Oxford Classical Texts, 1906–07).^40,42 The Greek text of all eleven plays in the reader.
W. J. Hickie, The Comedies of Aristophanes (London, Bohn, 1853).⁴² The reader's English Clouds.
Anonymous translator, in The Complete Greek Drama, vol. 2 (New York, Random House, 1938).⁴² The reader's English Birds.
N. G. Wilson, Aristophanis Fabulae, 2 vols (Oxford Classical Texts, 2007), with his companion volume of studies, Aristophanea (2007).⁴⁰ The current Oxford text.
A. H. Sommerstein, the plays edited with translation and commentary (1980–2002).⁴⁰ For a time, for many scholars, the edition of reference.
J. Henderson, Aristophanes, 5 vols (Loeb Classical Library 178–180, 488 and 502, 1998–2007).^2,43 A newly edited Greek text with an English translation and notes; the fifth volume holds the fragments of the lost plays.
R. Kassel and C. Austin, Poetae Comici Graeci III.2: Aristophanes, Testimonia et fragmenta (Berlin and New York, de Gruyter, 1984).^1,44 The standard edition of the fragments.
K. J. Dover, Aristophanes: Clouds (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1968).⁴⁵ Greek text, introduction and commentary.
K. J. Dover, Aristophanes: Frogs (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1993).⁴⁶ Greek text, introduction and commentary.

Where this comes from

Sources (47)

We checked every statement above against these sources on 2 October 2026. Where they disagree, we say so. What we could not confirm, we left out.

In The Painted Stoa

Entries that quote or point to Aristophanes's Greek.

The Melian DialogueIn the summer of 416 BC an Athenian fleet of thirty-eight ships anchored off Melos, a small island that wanted no part in the war between Athens and Sparta.PericlesFor about thirty years in the middle of the fifth century BC, the most powerful man in Athens held only an office the Assembly filled by vote every year: general.Going to school in AthensThere were no state schools in classical Athens.The symposiumA symposion means "drinking together".

All 7 entries

Asclepius and the healing sleepA sick Greek who could afford the journey might go to a sanctuary of Asclepius, the god of healing, wash, make an offering, and lie down for the night in a special hall, hoping the god would come in a dream and cure him.Love, sex and marriageA Greek marriage was a deal between two households, made so that a man would have legitimate children to inherit his house.Women's livesAlmost everything we read about Greek women was written by men.

The most mentioned words in Aristophanes (the Census)
Your own notes on Aristophanes (the Treasury)