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Aristophanes

Aristophanes

c. 446 BCE–c. 386 BCE · Athens

Aristophanes (c. 446 - c. 386 BCE) was the greatest comic playwright of classical Athens and the leading figure of what is called "Old Comedy." His surviving plays - among them "The Clouds," "The Birds," "Lysistrata," and "The Frogs" - combine fantastical plots, bawdy humor, and sharp satire of Athenian politicians, intellectuals, and fellow writers. They are our richest source for the comic stage of the period and offer a vivid, irreverent window onto Athenian society during the Peloponnesian War.

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AthensAttica (Greece)

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About Athens

The intellectual capital of the Greek world, where Socrates questioned in the agora and four great schools—Plato's Academy, Aristotle's Lyceum, the Stoa, and Epicurus' Garden—took root within a single square mile.

In Athens at the same time

Parmenides, Anaxagoras, Sophocles, Herodotus, Gorgias of Leontini, Euripides

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In the same place & time

Sages whose lives overlapped with Aristophanes’s in the same cities, drawn from their recorded journeys.

The world in their lifetime

Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Aristophanes’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.

Works(11)