In Aristophanes ' play Thesmophoriazusae the playwright parodies Euripides ' frequent use of the crane by making Euripides himself a character in the play and bringing him on stage by way of the mekhane.

How it fared in that festival's drama competition is unknown but it is now considered one of Aristophanes ' most brilliant parodies of Athenian society, with a particular focus on the subversive role of women in a male-dominated society, the vanity of contemporary poets, such as the tragic playwrights Euripides and Agathon, and the shameless, enterprising vulgarity of an ordinary Athenian, as represented in this play by the protagonist, Mnesilochus.

Aristophanes, in his comedy The Frogs, parodies such disputes by having Euripides and Aeschylus bicker over orthotes epeon.

Thessalic, Northwest Doric, Arcado-Cypriot and Pamphylian never became literary dialects and are only known from inscriptions, and to some extent by the comical parodies of Aristophanes and lexicographers.

After gaining the chorus's permission for an anti-war speech, Dikaiopolis / Aristophanes decides he needs some special help with it and he goes next door to the house of Euripides, an author renowned for his clever arguments.

For example, the comic playwright Aristophanes criticizes the sophists as hairsplitting wordsmiths, and makes Socrates their representative.

The poetic works of Alcaeus were collected into ten books, with elaborate commentaries, by the Alexandrian scholars Aristophanes of Byzantium and Aristarchus of Samothrace sometime in the 3rd century BC, and yet his verses today exist only in fragmentary form, varying in size from mere phrases, such as wine, window into a man ( fr. 333 ) to entire groups of verses and stanzas, such as those quoted below ( fr. 346 ).

In The Frogs, composed after Euripides and Aeschylus were both dead, Aristophanes imagines the god Dionysus venturing down to Hades in search of a good poet to bring back to Athens.

Both the playwright and his work were travestied by comic poets such as Aristophanes, the known dates of whose own plays thus serve as a terminus ad quem for those of Euripides, though sometimes the gap can be considerable ( e. g. twenty-seven years separate Telephus, known to have been produced in 438 BC, from its parody in Thesmophoriazusae in 411 BC!

Pea soup has been eaten since antiquity ; it is mentioned in Aristophanes ' The Birds, and according to one source " the Greeks and Romans were cultivating this legume about 500 to 400 BC.

As early as 1503 however, original language versions of Sophocles, Seneca, and Euripides, as well as comedic writers such as Aristophanes, Terence and Plautus were all available in Europe and the next forty years would see humanists and poets translating and adapting their tragedies.

Lyrics by his uncle, Simonides, and his rival, Pindar, were known in Athens and were sung at parties, they were parodied by Aristophanes and quoted by Plato, but no trace of Bacchylides ' work can be found until the Hellenistic age, when Callimachus began writing some commentaries on them.

Think of the barren image we should have of Socrates, had the works of Plato and Xenophon not come down to us and were we wholly dependent upon Aristophanes ' description of this Athenian philosopher.

The most probable solution of the difficulty is that of Friedrich Thiersch, who thinks that there were two artists of this name ; one an Argive, the instructor of Phidias, born about 540 BC, the other a native of Sicyon, who flourished at the date assigned by Pliny and was confounded by the scholiast on Aristophanes with his more illustrious namesake of Argos.

The scientific speculations of Ionian thinkers such as Thales in the sixth century were becoming commonplace knowledge in Aristophanes ' time and this had led, for instance, to a growing belief that civilized society was not a gift from the gods but rather had developed gradually from primitive man's animal-like existence.

Anaxagoras, whose works were studied by Socrates, was living in Athens when Aristophanes was a youth.

Tragic poets sometimes produced their plays in other cities ( Euripides ' play Andromache for example was possibly performed in Argos just before The Clouds appeared at the City Dionysia ) yet comic poets in Aristophanes ' time wrote specifically for local audiences and their plays were studded with topical jokes that only a local audience could understand.

Aristophanes ' plays however were generally unsuccessful in shaping public attitudes on important questions, as evidenced by their ineffectual opposition to the Peloponnesian War and to populists such as Cleon.

He mocks Cleon for his questionable pedigree but inscriptions indicate that the social origins of demagogues like Cleon were not as obscure as Aristophanes and other comic poets tried to make out.

The lists were probably based on the conjecture of ancient critics and yet there is little doubt that they reflect Aristophanes ' intentions.

The authors on which his time was mainly spent were the tragedians, Aristophanes, Athenaeus, and the lexicons of Suidas, Hesychius and Photius.

However Aristophanes and Socrates, though they were poor, became famous and successful.

Aristophanes then claims that when two people who were separated from each other find each other, they never again want to be separated ( 192c ).

Ferrets were first mentioned by Aristophanes in 450 BC and by Aristotle in 350 BC.

The Triballi were often described as a wild and warlike people ( Isocrates ), and in Aristophanes, a Triballian is introduced as a specimen of an uncivilized barbarian.

Many of Aristophanes ' plays were first performed there.

During the parabasis Aristophanes presents advice to give the rights of citizens back to people who had participated in the oligarchic revolution in 411 BC, arguing they were misled by Phrynichus ' ' tricks ' ( literally ' wrestlings ').

:" But dried figs were so very much sought after by all men ( for really, as Aristophanes says, " There's really nothing nicer than dried figs "), that even Amitrochates, the king of the Indians, wrote to Antiochus, entreating him ( it is Hegesander who tells this story ) to buy and send him some sweet wine, and some dried figs, and a sophist ; and that Antiochus wrote to him in answer, " The dry figs and the sweet wine we will send you ; but it is not lawful for a sophist to be sold in Greece " Athenaeus, " Deipnosophistae " XIV. 67

The comic poet, Aristophanes, is the earliest known critic to characterize Euripides as a spokesman for destructive, new ideas, associated with declining standards in both society and tragedy ( see Reception for more ).

Each of these plays and the others that Aristophanes wrote are known for their critical political and societal commentary.

The risk-taking for which Aristophanes is known is noticeably lacking in the New Comedy plays of Menander.

Modern critics call the Greek playwright Aristophanes one of the best known early satirists: his plays are known for their critical political and societal commentary, particularly for the political satire by which he criticized the powerful Cleon ( as in The Knights ).

The Aristophanes scholia also cite him often, and he is known to have written treatises on Euripides, Ion, Phrynichus, Cratinus, Menander, and many of the Greek orators including Demosthenes, Isaeus, Hypereides, Deinarchus, and others.

For example, the Greek Old Comedy of Aristophanes typically employed three stock characters: the alazon, the boastful imposter ; his ironic opponent, the eiron ; and the buffoon, known as the bomolochos.

The Knights ( Hippeîs ; Attic ) was the fourth play written by Aristophanes, the master of an ancient form of drama known as Old Comedy.

It is not known if this is the same Theorus that Aristophanes mocks elsewhere as an associate of Cleon.

His best known editions are those of Plato ( 1816 – 1823 ), Oratores Attici ( 1823 – 1824 ), Aristotle ( 1831 – 1836 ), Aristophanes ( 1829 ), and twenty-five volumes of the Corpus Scriptorum Historiae Byzantinae.

During these years Droysen studied classical antiquity ; he published a translation of Aeschylus in 1832 and a paraphrase of Aristophanes ( 1835 – 1838 ), but the work by which he made himself known as a historian was his Geschichte Alexanders des Grossen ( History of Alexander the Great ), ( Berlin, 1833 and other editions ), a book that long remained the best work on Alexander the Great.

The Athenian leader Cleon is known as a notorious demagogue mainly because of three events described in the writings of Thucydides and Aristophanes.

Along with the other surviving plays of Aristophanes, The Acharnians is one of the few examples we have of a highly satirical genre of drama known as Old Comedy.

No fragments of either are currently known, except for a few words of the elder apparently parodied in Aristophanes ' " The Clouds ".

While primarily known as a poet, McGrath has also written a play, " The Autobiography of Edvard Munch " ( produced by Concrete Gothic Theater, Chicago, 1983 ); a libretto for Orlando Garcia's experimental video opera " Transcending Time " ( premiered at the New Music Biennalle, Zagreb, Croatia, 2009 ); collaborated with the video artist John Stuart on the video / poetry piece " 14 Views of Miami " ( premiered at The Wolfsonian, Miami, 2008 ); and translated the Aristophanes play The Wasps for the Penn Greek Drama Series.

It is possible ( but by no means certain ), that some ancient sources ( scholia to Aristophanes and the Suda ) are correct in identifying Theognis the tyrant with the minor tragic poet of the same name, known from Aristophanes ' mocking references to the frigidity of his poetry ( Acharnians 11 and 138, Thesmophoriazusae 170 ).

For example, in the play The Wasps by Aristophanes the first parabasis is about Aristophanes ' career as a playwright to date, while the second parabasis is shorter, and contains a string of in-jokes about local characters who would be well known to the ancient Athenian audience ( e. g. the politician Cleon ).