Ancient Greek & Roman

Aristophanes

c. 446 – c. 386 BC

Aristophanes, born in Athens around 446 BC, was the great poet of Old Comedy and the only comic dramatist of his age whose plays survive in any number: eleven of roughly forty. He began to produce plays in his early twenties and wrote through the Peloponnesian War and its aftermath, turning the city's politicians, generals, sophists and fellow poets into figures of fantasy and abuse.

His surviving comedies include the Acharnians, Knights, Clouds, Wasps, Peace, Birds, Lysistrata, Thesmophoriazusae, Frogs, Ecclesiazusae and Wealth. The Clouds, first produced in 423 BC and later revised, places Socrates at the head of a school of the new learning; the play was a much-discussed case in later accounts of the philosopher's trial. Aristophanes died around 386 BC.

Major Works (8)

The Acharnians — translated by Benjamin Bickley Rogers (1924)
The Birds — translated by Benjamin Bickley Rogers (1924)
The Clouds — translated by Benjamin Bickley Rogers (1924)
The Ecclesiazusae — translated by Benjamin Bickley Rogers (1924)
The Frogs — translated by Benjamin Bickley Rogers (1924)
The Knights — translated by Benjamin Bickley Rogers (1924)
The Plutus — translated by Benjamin Bickley Rogers (1924)
The Wasps — translated by Benjamin Bickley Rogers (1924)

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