Aristophanes (448–380 BCE) was an ancient Greek comic dramatist whose topics included politics, philosophy, war and peace, the battle of the sexes, and the generational conflict between the old and the young. He is sometimes referred to as the “Father of Comedy;” if he did not invent comedy, he is its earliest consummate practitioner.
Eleven of Aristophanes’s forty plays have survived along with some 1,000 bits of other literary works. Nine of his plays involve the disastrous outcomes of the extended Peloponnesian War with Sparta, which ended in Athens’s defeat and swift decline. Aristophanes’s comic targets included such sacred cows as the Athenian democratic state and the Athenian jury system. With much stinging satire and scorn, he revealed these esteemed institutions and their representatives as less than perfect.
Aristophanes’s plays portray the life of ancient Athens perhaps more realistically than those of any other author did. Little is known of Aristophanes’s life and personality, but much about his times is reflected in his plays. He was a native Athenian. He was the last surviving great fifth-century BCE playwright, and his death ended a century of dramatic achievement.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Aristophanes
Evil events come from evil causes; and what we suffer, springs, generally from what we have done.
—Aristophanes
Topics: Misfortune
Hunger knows no friend but its feeder.
—Aristophanes
By words the mind is winged.
—Aristophanes
Topics: Words
The wise learn many things from their enemies.
—Aristophanes
Topics: Wisdom, Enemies, Enemy
These impossible women! How they do get around us! The poet was right: Can’t live with them, or without them.
—Aristophanes
Topics: Women
A man may learn wisdom even from a foe.
—Aristophanes
Topics: Wisdom, Learning, One liners
Wise men, though all laws were abolished, would lead the same lives.
—Aristophanes
Topics: Wisdom
Men of sense often learn from their enemies.—It is from their foes, not their friends, that cities learn the lesson of building high walls and ships of war; and this lesson saves their children, their homes, and their properties.
—Aristophanes
Topics: Prudence, Learning, Enemies
When men drink, then they are rich and successful and win lawsuits and are happy and help their friends. Quickly, bring me a beaker of wine, so that I may wet my mind and say something clever.
—Aristophanes
Topics: Wine
He works and blows the coals, and has plenty of other irons in the fire.
—Aristophanes
Topics: Work
Your lost friends are not dead, but gone before, advanced a stage or two upon that road which you must travel in the steps they trod.
—Aristophanes
Topics: Death, Dying
A man’s homeland is wherever he prospers.
—Aristophanes
Topics: Home
High thoughts must have high language.
—Aristophanes
Topics: Thoughts
No man is really honest; none of us is above the influence of gain.
—Aristophanes
Topics: Honesty
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