Aristophanes is a furious teenager. Think of him like this, in the 5th century BC.
He is fifteen when the war breaks out and Magnificent Athens finds itself under siege. The Spartans invade the countryside surrounding the city; the farmers flee into the city with their children, goats and donkeys. Athens is then overpopulated with people crowded together in the houses and on the streets, the plague breaks out and among others Pericles dies, the man who had governed the city for thirty years making it powerful. Athens staggers under the blows of its rival: think of the twenty-year-old Aristophanes who, like his fellow citizens, lives the horrors of war. The theater will become for him the space of utopia, the magical place in which to overturn the horror of reality.
Aristophanes’ theatre tells us about the city and its soul, its political and intimate life. He mixes his swipes against the demagogues of the time with the desire to have wings, he confuses the real and the fantastic: he continually steps out of line. His writing surprises us and speaks to us like the voice of an ancestor.
The comedy of Aristophanes, of this furious adolescent, is the sound of a horn thrown in the face of death.
