(Ἀριστοφάνης), the only writer of the old comedy of whom any entire works are left. His later extant plays approximate rather to the middle comedy, and in the Cocalus, his last production, he so nearly approached the new, that Philemon brought it out a second time with very little alteration.
Aristophanes was the son of Philippus, as is stated by all the authorities for his life, and proved by the fact of his son also having that name, although a bust exists with the inscription Ἀριστοφάνης Φιλιππίδου, which is, however, now generally allowed to be spurious. He was an Athenian of the tribe Pandionis, and the Cydathenaean Demus, and is said to have been the pupil of Prodicus, though this is improbable, since he speaks of him rather with contempt. (Nub. 360, Av. 692, Tagenist. Fragm. xviii. Bekk.) We are told (Schol. ad Ran. 502), that he first engaged in the comic contests when he was σχέδον μειράκισκος, and we know that the date of his first comedy was B. C. 427 : we are therefore warranted in assigning about B. C. 444 as the date of his birth, and his death was probably not later than B. C. 380. His three sons, Philippus, Araros, and Nicostratus, were all poets of the middle comedy. Of his private history we know nothing but that he was a lover of pleasure (Plat. Symp. particularly p. 223), and one who spent whole nights in drinking and witty conversation. Accusations (his anonymous biographer says, more than one) were brought against him by Cleon, with a view to deprive him of his civic rights (ξενίας γραφαί), but without success, as indeed they were merely the fruit of revenge for his attacks on that demagogue. They
The comedies of Aristophanes are of the highest historical interest, containing as they do an admirable series of caricatures on the leading men of the day, and a contemporary commentary on the evils existing at Athens. Indeed, the caricature is the only feature in modern social life which at all resembles them. Aristophanes was a bold and often a wise patriot. He had the strongest affection for Athens, and longed to see her restored to the state in which she was flourishing in the previous generation, and almost in his own childhood, before Pericles became the head of the government, and when the age of Miltiades and Aristeides had but just passed away. The first great evil of his own time against which he inveighs, is the Peloponnesian war, which he regards as the work of Pericles, and even attributes it (Pax, 606) to his fear of punishment for having connived at a robbery said to have been committed by Phidias on the statue of Athene in the Parthenon, and to the influence of Aspasia. (Ach. 500.) To this fatal war, among a host of evils, he ascribes the influence of vulgar demagogues like Cleon at Athens, of which also the example was set by the more refined demagogism of Pericles. Another great object of his indignation was the recently adopted system of education which had been introduced by the Sophists, acting on the speculative and inquiring turn given to the Athenian mind by the Ionian and Eleatic philosophers, and the extraordinary intellectual development of the age following the Persian war. The new theories introduced by the Sophists threatened to overthrow the foundations of morality, by making persuasion and not truth the object of man in his intercourse with his fellows, and to substitute a universal scepticism for the religious creed of the people. The worst effects of such a system were seen in Alcibiades, who, caring for nothing but his own ambition, valuing eloquence only for its worldly advantages, and possessed of great talents which he utterly misapplied, combined all the elements which Aristophanes most disliked, heading the war party in politics, and protecting the sophistical school in philosophy and also in literature. Of this latter school--the literary and poetical Sophists--Euripides was the chief, whose works are full of that μετεωροσοφία which contrasts so offensively with the moral dignity of Aeschylus and Sophocles, and for which Aristophanes introduces him as soaring in the air to write his tragedies (Ach. 374), caricaturing thereby his own account of himself. (Alc. 971.) Another feature of the times was the excessive love for litigation at Athens, the consequent importance of the dicasts, and disgraceful abuse of their power; all of which enormities are made by Aristophanes objects of continual attack. But though he saw what were the evils of his time, he had not wisdom to find a remedy for them, except the hopeless and undesirable one of a movement backwards ; and therefore, though we allow him to have been honest and bold, we must deny him the epithet of great.
[G.E.L.C]