Tornado Alley (PROG)

[StephanieVanbryce]

ARISTOPHANES

Born between 457 and 444 BC, Aristophanes died around 385 BC: little else is known about his life. A member of the minor nobility, Aristophanes was impeached by the Athenian senate after he criticized foreign policy. He wrote about forty plays, eleven of which survive. In his comedies, Aristophanes challenged the Realpolitik of the day with utopian solutions.

During Aristophanes’ life, the most pressing issue in Athenian foreign policy was the conflict with Sparta, the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BC). The conflict began over land disputes and Athenian imperialism, but was also based on the ideological rivalry between democratic Athens and oligarchic Sparta. The war lasted twenty-seven years and ruined Athens through years of sieges, the annihilation of her navy, and humiliating losses in battle. Pericles, the great Athenian leader of the mid-5th century, died in a plague, which also killed more than a quarter of the city’s population. The futile war weighed heavily on Aristophanes’s mind as he was writing Lysistrata.

Aristophanes is the only author of Old Comedy whose works have survived, and most of what we know about the genre is extrapolated from his work. Having evolved from the fertility rites and satyr plays of previous centuries, Old Comedy flourished in Athens in the fifth century BC. Politically charged and vocal in its defense of freedom, it combined obscene jokes with political satire. Aristophanes’ attack on Socrates in his 423 BC play, The Birds, for example, was apparently so wounding that it contributed to the philosopher’s execution.

Writers of Old Comedy had resource to a number of devices no longer employed today. Most important was the parabasis, an interlude in which the playwright spoke directly to the audience through the chorus and could express his own opinions. Aristophanes liked to use this spot to attack politicians, or harangue the audience for not having given his play first prize in the competition the previous year.

Perhaps the most celebrated aspect of Old Comedy, however, was its appropriation of Dionysian rituals: the members of the chorus traditionally wore huge prosthetic leather phalluses.


LYSISTRATA
http://www.amrep.org/lysistrata/