Aristophanes

Born around 446 BC in Athens, probably to a family of modest landowners, Aristophanes entered the dramatic competitions at the Lenaia and the City Dionysia while still a teenager, initially submitting plays under other men's names because he considered himself too young to direct. His first play produced under his own name, The Acharnians (425 BC), won first prize, and for the next four decades he dominated the Athenian comic stage. Of the roughly forty plays he wrote, eleven survive complete, the only extant works of Old Comedy, the raucous, politically savage, sexually explicit genre that was as central to Athenian democracy as the assembly itself. The Knights (424 BC) attacked the demagogue Cleon so viciously that no mask-maker would craft Cleon's likeness and Aristophanes reportedly painted his own face. The Clouds (423 BC) mocked Socrates as a quack philosopher suspended in a basket, a portrait Plato later claimed prejudiced the jury that condemned his teacher. The Birds (414 BC) imagined a utopian city built in the sky. Lysistrata (411 BC) staged a sex strike to end the Peloponnesian War. The Frogs (405 BC) descended to Hades to judge whether Aeschylus or Euripides was the greater tragedian. Virtually nothing is known of his private life. He had at least one son, Araros, who also wrote comedies. He died around 386 BC, by which time the freewheeling political satire he had perfected was already giving way to the gentler domestic comedy of the next century.

In 405 BC, mid-play, Aristophanes broke from comedy in The Frogs' parabasis to argue that Athens restore citizenship to men stripped of it for backing the oligarchic coup of 411 BC. The city was moved enough to restage the play and crown him with a wreath of sacred olive, an honor the ancient record credits directly to that speech.