Who is Aristophanes and what did he do for ancient Greece?
Aristophanes From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Aristophanes as imagined by a nineteenth century illustrator. It can be inferred from jests in his plays The Clouds and Peace that he was prematurely bald.[1]Aristophanes (Ἀριστοφάνης, ca. 446 – ca. 386 BC), son of Philippus, of the deme Cydathenaus,[2] was a prolific and much acclaimed comic playwright of ancient Athens. Eleven of his forty plays have come down to us virtually complete. These, as well as fragments of some of his other plays, provide us with the only real example we have of a genre of comic drama known as Old Comedy and they are in fact used to define the genre.[3] Also known as the Father of Comedy and the Prince of Ancient Comedy,[4] Aristophanes has been said to recreate the life of ancient Athens more convincingly than any other author.[5] His powers of ridicule were feared and acknowledged by influential contemporaries – Plato[6][7] singled out Aristophanes’ play The Clouds as slander contributing to the trial and
