Since the eighteenth century, classical scholars have generally
agreed that the Greek playwright Aristophanes did not as a matter
of course write "political" plays. Yet, according to an anonymous
Life of Aristophanes, when Dionysius the tyrant of Syracuse wanted
to know about the government of Athens, Plato sent him a copy of
Aristophanes' Clouds. In this boldly revisionist work, Michael
Vickers convincingly argues that in his earlier plays, Aristophanes
in fact commented on the day-to-day political concerns of
Athenians. Vickers reads the first six of Aristophanes' eleven
extant plays in a way that reveals the principal characters to be
based in large part on Pericles and his ward Alcibiades. According
to Vickers, the plays of Aristophanes-far from being
nonpolitical-actually allow us to gauge the reaction of the
Athenian public to the events that followed Pericles' death in 429
B.C., to the struggle for the political succession, and to the
problems presented by Alcibiades' emergence as one of the most
powerful figures in the state. This view of Aristophanes reaffirms
the central role of allegory in his work and challenges all
students of ancient Greece to rethink long-held assumptions about
this important playwright.
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