Aristophanes

Aristophanes. He is one of the best comedy writers ever. His highly critical and satyr humor was popularized in antiquity and even today his works are still performed with the same comic intensity that at that time was the delight of Athenian society.

Table of Contents

Summary

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1 Biographical synthesis
2 Trajectory
3 Relations with the Athenian public
4 Influence of society
5 Ideology
6 Language and style
7 Works
8 Phrases
9 Sources

Biographical synthesis

He was born in the time of Pericles , a period of peace, and his birth can be placed around 445 BC. Athenian by birth, all his works tell us about the poet’s close relationship with the political and literary life of his time. It does not seem that he was a member of any political party, although he is a defender of the old ideals and little friend of the new trends of sophistry. He is not an adversary of democracy, although his comedies contain strong political satires, probably because the Attic democratic system was beginning to break down in his time.

Trajectory

He was a citizen involved in Athenian politics: he participated in political struggles for the establishment of the Aristocratic Party and, from their ranks, he disagreed with the democratic way of governing. He opposed the Peloponnesian war, because it led the peasants of Attica to misery, in a fratricidal war that he denounced especially in Lysistrata.

His conservative stance led him to defend the validity of traditional religious myths and he was reluctant to face any new philosophical doctrine. Especially known is his animosity towards Socrates , whom in his comedy The Clouds he presents as a demagogue dedicated to instilling all kinds of nonsense in the minds of young people. In the artistic field he was not characterized by an innovative attitude either; he regarded Euripides’s theater as a degradation of the classical theater.

Of his forty comedies, eleven have survived in their entirety, which are also the only Greek comedies preserved; It is difficult, therefore, to establish the degree of originality attributed to him as the highest representative of this genre. His comedies are based on an ingenious use of language, often incisive and sarcastic, and combine the trivial and everyday with slow lyrical expositions that interrupt the action. This constitutes a personal formula, which has never been adapted, neither by Latinos nor during the Renaissance .

Relations with the Athenian public

Regarding his relations with the Athenian public, the acceptance he had from his contemporaries is clear in the awards that were granted to him, Aristophanes himself speaks in the parabasis of the Knights of the inconstancy of the public’s favor, which sometimes favors or damages an author depending on the type of work presented in the contest and its theme. As for awards, he did not obtain all of those he aspired to in competition with Cratino and Eupolis, but his first place with Los Acarnienses, Los Caballeros and Las Ranas is known and the second with La Paz, Las Avispas and Las Aves, in addition to others, both in the Leneas and the Dionysias. Finally say that his participation in public life is attested in an inscription from the beginning of the 4th century that names Aristophanes as a prítano (first magistrate).

Influence of society

From a society to such a decadent point, Aristophanes was able to obtain enough material to carry out his political comedies, characterized by the attack against individuals of great importance within Athenian society, such as Socrates, or by the attack against a certain type of institution or even against society itself as a whole and against the Athenian constitution through the elaboration of an ideal political society model very different from the existing real society, with a scathing censorship and criticism of citizen politics.

Aristophanes then enters, sometimes without the current reader being able to realize it, in the political struggle, in the struggle of parties, in the confrontation of the interests of the people towards the public administration. Aristophanes then enters into a group of “scholars” who seek “the solution”, or at least a solution, for an Athens doomed to a slow agony and decline.

It is then, in 392 BC, when Aristophanes wrote for her representation one of his last conserved comedies: The Assembly Members, a work that we can divide into two very different parts: a first that shows us the government of women with its political program characterized by a marked ” communism ” and a second part development of this ideal set in motion and in practice in different comic, parodic and burlesque scenes.

Aristophanes throughout his work, and for that reason no less in this work, overflows his fantasy and ingenuity, here to contrast with reality a double utopia: a communist ideal in which the new relationship of man with money and money is introduced. Regarding love , within all this of a new society in which the state pays for everything and the slaves are the only ones who dedicate themselves to work, dedicating the Athenian citizen solely and exclusively to living (this ideal is expressed in the scene in which Proxágora indicates the points of his political program.

The second utopian question that Aristophanes deals with is the ideal of a government of women as a logical and natural result after the bad government of men who even laugh with resentment and impotence of having already tried all possible means to carry forward the ship of state. to no avail.

Ideology

Politics, religion, and Enlightenment thought are the three common denominations that mark the reactionary profile of Aristophanic ideology.

His political ideology is characterized by the conservatism typical of those who relentlessly attack the defenders of the people and their institutions. Conservative position is the one that reflects his presumed pacifism, which coincides with the position maintained by the Athenian peasants during the Peloponnesian war. Criticize democracy and revolution.
In the religious field, the apparent lack of belief that we witness again and again is striking. Certain traits of traditional religion are the object of his continuous puyas: Zeus is the eternal Don Juan, Heracles borders on gluttony and Dionysus prowls cowardice. The festive character of the comic farce is not a sufficient justification for its mockery of the gods.
His political ideology is characterized by the conservatism typical of those who relentlessly attack the defenders of the people and their institutions. Conservative position is the one that reflects his presumed pacifism, which coincides with the position maintained by the Athenian peasants during the Peloponnesian war. Criticize democracy and revolution.
In the religious field, the apparent lack of belief that we witness again and again is striking. Certain traits of traditional religion are the object of his continuous pujas: Zeus is the eternal Don Juan, Heracles borders on gluttony and Dionysus prowls cowardice. The festive character of the comic farce is not a sufficient justification for its mockery of the gods.
Faced with the changes of the Enlightenment, Aristophanes became a defender of traditional education. The poet is aware of being an educator of youth. But the worst thing is that he becomes the supreme judge of good and bad by presenting distorted characters on stage who embody immorality. Socrates will be painted as a consummate atheist, rationalizing physical phenomena and distancing them from the mythology of popular religion; the same happens with Euripidesand his contempt for women. It is in this defense of tradition that Aristophanes’ religious criticism finds coherence. However, despite the ideological charge, all the works of Aristophanes are of great value for understanding the society of his time, of which he is a faithful mirror: this is how the financial organization, the army, the system are understood from him. judicial and other aspects.

Language and style

It is a conglomeration of contrasts at the service of humor. The words and ideas of his comedies are subjected to the continuous bankruptcy of the unusual, achieving great comedy. Aristophanes resorts to comparisons, images, hyperbole, puns. The creation of compounds of more than two elements leads to the production of verbal spawn. Take advantage of all the distortion and double meaning possibilities offered by proper names. He mixes horrendous vulgarisms with elevated poetic forms in the lyrical songs, when he parodies poets and philosophers. It also parodies the sublime language of tragedy with comic effect. In short, in his language real and fantastic elements are inexplicably united, based on the spoken attic of the poet’s time.

Plays

Eleven comedies of a total of forty-four that reached the Alexandrian period are preserved, although the scholars doubted the authorship of four of them, whose author could be Archippus. This conservation is not due so much to the valuation of its merits, as to the fact that the Atticists greatly appreciated his work as the purest source of the ancient attic. His works have great dynamism due to the use of music, dialogues, and choirs.

The Acamenses (425 BC): this work talks about the Athens – Sparta war , in it he invites the Athenian politicians to end the war and start a period of peace.
The Knights (424 BC): this is a satire work where he harshly criticizes the military and strategist Cleón , leader of the warmongering party.
The Clouds (423 BC): this is a satire on all sophists and especially the most representative of them, the philosopher Socrates, since Aristophanes believed that he used his oratory for political purposes (it is known that Aristophanes was not a supporter of democracy but of the monarchy).
The Wasps (422 BC): makes a satire on Athenian justice and on the strategist Cleon. In it we are shown two main characters representing father and son called Bdelicleón (the son) and Filocleón (the father). Aristophanes criticizes in this work how the Athenian citizens are obsessed with being popular juries in the courts of Athens.

Representation of one of the works of Aristophanes

Bdelicleón represents the worried son who locks up his father at home so that he does not attend the daily trials in the city, Filocleón represents the father, who uses various and funny tricks to escape from home to flee with those who like him the day in court waiting who to convict. The wasps represent Philocleón’s chorus of friends who want to help him escape from home to go to the courthouse at dawn, and who in the play are disguised as wasps with stingers simulating the metaphor that they are the ones who work in front of the judges and politicians who use the citizens to enrich themselves while the poor wasps receive a miserable ebolo for their jury services.

La Paz (421 BC): this work was performed shortly after the death of Cleon and the signing of the Treaty of Nícias that augured a period of peace between Sparta and Athens. In it, Aristophanes includes a main character who represents being a country man who, disgusted by the war, decides to go visit the Gods so that they intercede with the Greeks to restore peace. He uses a huge beetle with which he flies to Olympus and where he finds the god Hermeswho helps him unearth the Goddess Peace from a grave, she explains that the Greeks have abandoned her in favor of war. Finally, our character intercedes on behalf of men and asks him to once again watch over all the Greeks. Upon their return home, a great brotherhood party begins where men can return to cultivate their fields, exchanging weapons of war for their farm implements.
The Birds (414 BC): criticizes Athenian society and its strange taste for meddling in legal problems.
Lysistrata (411 BC): undoubtedly his best known and most represented work, in it the women establish a pact by which they will not have sexual relations with their husbands until the war is over , a comical way of pressing for peace .
The tesmoforiazusas (411 BC) and Las Ranas (405 BC) is a direct attack on Euripides .
The women’s assembly (392 BC) lays down a satire on the commons.
Pluto (388 BC) makes a criticism of the distribution of wealth in the city.

Phrases

Distrust is the mother of security.

The only thing in the world worse than one woman is another.

In adversity, virtue comes to light.