Clouds - Tapa dura

1892. Aristophanes was a Greek comic playwright. A brilliant satirist, he used the freedom of Old Comedy to ridicule public figures, institutions, and even the gods. In Clouds, the plot of the comedy, like most of those of Aristophanes, is very simple. A man belonging to the once sound and uncorrupted core of the people, a countryman, who has suffered material and moral ruin through the evils common to the times, though not yet himself attacked by the poison of the new culture, is led by adverse circumstances to embrace it. He has been wealthy, and could have enjoyed his property in peace and quiet, but weakness and want of character have involved him in a series of misfortunes. External influence, perhaps also the desire to raise himself above his rank, has induced him to marry a noble, but mistrained girl of a proud family. See other titles by this author available from Kessinger Publishing.

ARISTOPHANES, the most famous comic dramatist of ancient Greece, was born an Athenian citizen in about 445 B.C. Forty-four plays have been attributed to Aristophanes; eleven of these have survived. His plays are the only extant representatives of Greek Old Comedy, a dramatic form whose conventions made it inevitable that the author would comment on the political and social issues of fifth-century Athens. This Aristophanes did so well that Plato, asked by the tyrant of Syracuse for an analysis of Athenians, sent a copy of Aristophanes' plays in reply.
    
His earliest play, the Banqueters, won the second prize in 427 B.C. when the dramatist must have been less than eighteen years old, since, as he notes in the Clouds (423), he was too young to produce it in his own name. Another early play, the Babylonians, criticized the demagogue Cleon, who responded by subjecting Aristophanes to legal persecution, and as the author charges in the Acharnians, Cleon had "slanged, and lied, and slandered and betongued me . . . till I well nigh was done to death." Nevertheless, in the Knights (424), he renewed his attack on the popular Athenian leader and won first prize in that year's contest. Plutus (388) was the last of the author's plays to be produced in his lifetime.