Pericles on stage

Scholars of ancient Greece have largely held, since the 1700s, that Aristophanes was not in the habit of writing overtly political comedy. An anonymous biography of the playwright, however, recounts that Plato sent Dionysius, tyrant of Syracuse, a copy of the Clouds when the ruler asked how Athens was governed.

Michael Vickers challenges that consensus. He argues that Aristophanes' early works use allegory to respond to the everyday political concerns of Athenian citizens. Reading the first six of the eleven comedies that survive, Vickers shows that the central figures are modeled largely on Pericles, the fifth-century B.C. Athenian statesman, along with his extended household, especially Alcibiades, Pericles' ward.

On this reading, Aristophanes' plays are anything but apolitical. They offer a window onto how the Athenian public viewed events after Pericles died in 429 B.C., the contest over who would succeed him, and the challenge posed by Alcibiades' rise to become one of the state's most powerful men. The book reaffirms the importance of allegory in Aristophanes' work and asks anyone studying ancient Greece to reconsider long-accepted views of this playwright.