Aristophanes ' fable is only one of many perspectives on love in the Symposium, and should not be considered identical with Plato's own ideas.

Another classical interpretation of the phenomenon of " love at first sight " is found in Plato's Symposium in Aristophanes ' description of the separation of primitive double-creatures into modern men and women and their subsequent search for their missing half: "... when lover ... is fortunate enough to meet his other half, they are both so intoxicated with affection, with friendship, and with love, that they cannot bear to let each other out of sight for a single instant.

In the Symposium, Agathon is presented as the friend of the comic poet Aristophanes, but this alleged friendship did not prevent Aristophanes from harshly criticizing Agathon in at least two of his comic plays: the Thesmophoriazousae and the ( now lost ) Gerytades.

* 385 BC – Plato publishes Symposium in which Phaedrus, Eryixmachus, Aristophanes and other Greek intellectuals argue that love between males is the highest form, while sex with women is lustful and utilitarian.

With the exception of Aristophanes, all of Socrates ' named friends from the Symposium are in attendance: Eryximachus the doctor, and Phaedrus are there, and so are the lovers Pausanias and Agathon ( who is said to be a mere boy at this point ), and Alcibiades.

Yet it is unlikely that Aristophanes would have intended these charges to be taken seriously, since Plato depicts Aristophanes and Socrates as being on very good terms with each other in the Symposium.

This differs from the stance taken by Aristophanes in the Symposium and is in stark contrast to the Phaedrus, which presents pederasty in a positive light.

Aristophanes mentions the burning lens in his play The Clouds ( 424 BC ).

A scholium to line 971 of Aristophanes ' The Birds mentions a cult " to Pandora, the earth, because she bestows all things necessary for life ".

Aristophanes mentions Iaso humorously in Ploutos, when one of the characters, Cario, reports that Iaso blushed upon his passing gas.

* Aristophanes: The author explains his cautious approach to his own career and he mentions his own baldness ( lines 507-50 ).

The character Meton of Athens in the play The Birds by Aristophanes ( first performed in 414 BCE ) mentions squaring the circle.

Aristophanes mentions that people used to swear by birds instead of by the gods, adding that the soothsayer Lampon still swears by the goose " whenever he's going to cheat you ".

We are assured in lines 62-3 that Aristophanes won't make mincemeat of him again but promises mean nothing in a comedy and he receives more treatment in lines 197, 242, 409, 596, 759, 1220, 1224, 1237, 1285 as well as numerous indirect mentions, notably as an untrustworthy dog.

Another of Aristophanes ' plays, Peace, also mentions how war was being brewed in Megara by the god of war.

At Sparta women competed in public exercise — so in Aristophanes ' Lysistrata the Athenian women admire the tanned, muscular bodies of their Spartan counterparts — and women could own property in their own right, as they could not at Athens.

Apparently as criticism, about 2, 400 years ago, in 390 BCE, Aristophanes wrote a play, Ecclesiazusae, about women gaining legislative power and governing Athens, Greece, on a limited principle of equality.

Aristophanes ' Ecclesiazusae (, Ekklesiazousai ; translated as Assemblywomen, Congresswomen, Women in Parliament, Women in Power, and A Parliament of Women ) is a play dating from 391 BCE which is similar in theme to Lysistrata in that a large portion of the comedy comes from women involving themselves in politics.

In Sparta, sources such as Aristophanes ' plays suggest that women also exercised publicly and nakedly.

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 of Byzantium, a scholar who flourished in Alexandria, 3rd – 2nd century BC

According to Aristophanes, the alleged co-author was a celebrated actor, Cephisophon, who also shared the tragedian's house and his wife, while Socrates taught an entire school of quibblers like Euripides:

In 425 BC, which is about the time that Herodotus is thought by many scholars to have died, the Athenian comic dramatist, Aristophanes, created The Acharnians, in which he blames The Peloponnesian War on the abduction of some prostitutes-a mocking reference to Herodotus, who reported the Persians ' account of their wars with Greece, beginning with the rapes of the mythical heroines Io, Europa, Medea and Helen.

by the Alexandrian scholar, Aristophanes of Byzantium, who probably restored them to their appropriate metres after finding them written in prose form.

The system was further refined by his student Aristophanes of Byzantium, who first introduced the asterisk and used a symbol resembling a ⊤ for an obelus ; and finally by Aristophanes ' student, in turn, Aristarchus, from whom they earned the name of ' Aristarchian symbols '.

The Greek poet Homer mentioned a kind of blood sausage in the Odyssey, Epicharmus wrote a comedy titled The Sausage, and Aristophanes ' play The Knights is about a sausage-vendor who is elected leader.

His rivalry there with another chorus-trainer and poet, Lasus of Hermione, became something of a joke to Athenians of a later generation — it is mentioned briefly by the comic playwright Aristophanes who earmarked Simonides as a miserly type of the professional poet ( see The Miser below )

Cyrene is also mentioned in the second and third hymns of Callimachus as well as in The Poet and the Women ( written by Aristophanes ) whence Mnesilochus comments that he " can't see a man there at all-only Cyrene " when setting eyes upon the poet Agathon who emerges from his house to greet Euripides and himself dressed in women's clothing.

The most famous mention of Iacchus is in The Frogs by Aristophanes, where the Mystae ( mystics ) invoke him as a riotous dancer in the meadow, attended by the Charites, who " tosses torches " and is likened to a star bringing light to the darkness of the rites.

Hermes recommends it in Aristophanes ' Peace ( v. 712 ) to the hero who ate too much dry fruit and nuts.

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.

When the god's sight is restored, in Aristophanes ' comedy, he is then able to determine who is deserving of wealth, creating havoc.

Aristophanes, in The Frogs, pokes fun at Theramenes ' ability to extricate himself from tight spots, but delivers none of the scathing rebukes one would expect for a politician whose role in the shocking events after Arginusae had been regarded as particularly blameworthy, and modern scholars have seen in this a more accurate depiction of how Theramenes was perceived in his time ; Lysias, meanwhile, who mercilessly attacks Theramenes on many counts, has nothing negative to say about the aftermath of Arginusae.

Wolf, who inspired Heine's lifelong love of Aristophanes.

Petronius ’ realism has a Greek antecedent in Aristophanes, who also abandoned the epical tone to focus on ordinary subjects.

* Heliodorus ( metrist ) a metrist in the 1st century who did work on the comedies of Aristophanes

A word used to denote a very old-fashioned individual ( bekkeselene !, line 398 ) might have been an allusion by Aristophanes to Herodotus ' account of an experiment by the Egyptian Pharaoh to determine humanity's original language, which Pharaoh concluded to be Phrygian on the grounds that the Phrygian word for bread ( bekkos ) was the first word spoken by some infants who had never been taught to speak.

It has been argued that Aristophanes caricatured a ' pre-Socratic ' Socrates and that the philosopher depicted by Plato was a more mature thinker who had been influenced by such criticism.

Eryximachus ends up speaking instead of Aristophanes, who does not recover from his hiccups soon enough to take his place in the sequence.

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

Hyperbolus was a frequent target of satire in Aristophanes ' plays, a role previously filled by Cleon, who had died in 422.

The phrase was well-known to later authors ; Aristophanes paraphrases it in The Wasps, and Plutarch, who disliked Herodotus, says the author " would dance away the truth " like Hippocleides.