Aristophanes was an Athenian playwright who lived from about 446 to 386 BC, the greatest writer of Greek Old Comedy and often called the 'Father of Comedy'.
He wrote some forty plays, of which eleven survive more or less complete - by far the largest body of ancient comedy to come down to us, and a vivid, irreverent window onto life and politics in classical Athens. His comedies are gleefully topical and fearless, lampooning the powerful and the fashionable alike: he savaged the populist politician Cleon and, in The Clouds, mercilessly caricatured the philosopher Socrates.
Among his best-known plays are Lysistrata, in which the women of Greece withhold sex to force their men to end a war; the literary contest in the underworld of The Frogs; the soaring civic fantasy of The Birds; and the political satires The Knights and The Wasps. Bawdy, inventive and sharply intelligent, they have shaped comic theatre ever since.
He himself appears as a genial character in Plato's Symposium - though Plato later suggested that The Clouds, by mocking Socrates, helped turn Athens against him.
