He was also personally involved in bringing the healing cult of Asclepius to Athens. He died in , soon after Euripides. Aristotle admired Sophocles and particularly his Oedipus the King because he wrote good plots about important people. We know of a total of plays written by Sophocles, of which a mere seven survive. Euripides was the youngest of the three great tragedians. Born in the s b. He competed twenty-one more times, but won only four times, including with the tetralogy that included Bacchae and Iphigeneia at Aulis , produced after his death in Dates of death range from — B.
Bloom, Harold, ed. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, David, E. Leiden: E. Brill, Russo, Carlo Ferdinando. Aristophanes, an Author for the Stage. New York: Routledge, Toggle navigation. His life Aristophanes was born in Athens between and B. His plays Aristophanes' special touch with comedy is best explained with a look at the original Greek comedy.
Downfall and death All of Aristophanes' comedies kept pace with the political climate of Athens. For More Information Bloom, Harold, ed. The following year came The Knights, a violent and abusive but often very funny attack on Cleon, who is represented as the greedy and dishonest slave of a dimwitted old gentleman, Demos the Athenian people personified ; the slave is his master's favorite until displaced by an even more vulgar and unscrupulous character, a sausage seller.
At the time Cleon was at the height of his influence and popularity, and it says much for the tolerance of the Athenians that even in wartime the play could be produced and, moreover, awarded first prize in the competition for comedies. In Aristophanes turned from politics to education with The Clouds, in which a dishonest old farmer tries to obtain from Socrates an education of the new sophistic type in an attempt to avoid paying his debts.
Aristophanes himself thought highly of the play, but it was a failure. A few years later, after , he revised it, but the text that has survived is an incomplete revision that could not be performed as it stands. For this reason the play is not entirely satisfactory, but the comic inventiveness of several scenes and the interest of the portrayal of Socrates have always made it very popular.
It has sometimes been described as an attack on Socrates, but the sympathetic picture of Aristophanes in Plato's Symposium suggests that the dramatist continued to be on quite good terms thereafter with Socrates and his associates.
In Aristophanes produced The Wasps, an amusing and good-natured satire on the fondness of the Athenians for litigation. A year later he greeted the prospect of peace between Athens and its enemies with Peace, a rapturous and sometimes very bawdy celebration of the delights of peacetime existence in the Attic countryside. During the 6 years of uneasy truce which followed the conclusion of peace in , Aristophanes presumably continued to write plays, but none of them has survived.
The next extant play was The Birds, produced in , soon after the war had begun again with the great Athenian expedition to Sicily. This splendid drama, one of Aristophanes's most poetic and exuberant creations, deals with the adventures of two Athenians who migrate to Birdland; they persuade the birds to found a new city in the skies, Cloudcuckoobury, and then to blockade Olympus till the gods are forced to hand over their power to the birds.
Political unrest in Athens and intrigues in the winter of resulted in an oligarchic revolution in May Shortly before this Aristophanes had produced a conspiracy of his own: in Lysistrata he depicted the women of Greece banding together to stop the war by refusing to sleep with their husbands until they have made peace. With such a plot the play is inevitably bawdy, and much of the humor is forced, as if Aristophanes did not find it easy to jest in such depressing times.
However, Lysistrata herself is one of his most attractive characters, and his sympathy for the plight of women in wartime makes the play a moving comment on the folly of war.
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What Was the Charge Against Socrates? Biography of Euripides, Third of the Great Tragedians.
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