C.D. Warner, et al., comp.
The Library of the World’s Best Literature. An Anthology in Thirty Volumes. 1917.

Aristophanes (c. 448–c. 388 B.C.)

Aristophanes (ar-is-tof’a-nēz). The greatest of the Greek writers of comedy (c. 448–c. 388 B.C.); born at Athens. His comedy ‘The Knights’ is said to have been put on the stage when the author was but twenty years old. Of his 44 plays only eleven have come down to us. These are: ‘The Knights’; ‘The Clouds,’—prized by him above all the rest,—wherein he ridicules the Sophists and with them Socrates; ‘The Wasps,’ in which the Athenians are lashed for their litigiousness; ‘The Acharnians’; ‘The Peace’ and ‘The Lyristrate,’ arguments for concord among Grecian States; ‘The Birds,’ a satire against the “Greater Athens” idea; in ‘The Thesmophoriazusæ’ the Athenian women carry off to court the poet Euripides in punishment of his misogyny; ‘The Frogs,’ directed against Euripides, as the cause of the degeneration of dramatic art; in ‘The Ecclesiazusæ’ or ‘Ladies in Parliament,’ he reduces to absurdity the overweening expectation of the righting of all wrongs through political reforms; in the ‘Plutus’ the blind god of wealth is made to see and the good old times come back again. (See Critical and Biographical Introduction).

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