Skip to content

Aristophanes

Athens’ great comic playwright; 11 of his 40 plays survive, among them The Clouds, which mocked Socrates.

446 BC–386 BC · Wikipedia · Photo: Alexander Mayatsky, CC BY-SA 4.0

Books

The Clouds423 BC
Socrates as a fraud who runs a school of clever talk. It came last at the festival.
The Birds414 BC
Two fed-up Athenians talk the birds into building a city in the sky.
Lysistrata411 BC
The women of Greece go on strike until their men end the war.
The Frogs405 BC
Dionysus goes down to Hades to bring back a good poet. It won first prize.

Mentioned in

In praise of asking, part two
Why should a simple question cost so much? A nine-year-old tested a healing method with a towel and a piece of cardboard, a doctor drank a glass of bacteria, and Socrates drank the hemlock; each price depended on the certainty the question shook.
23 September 2026