The play begins with Dikaiopolis sitting all alone on the Pnyx (the hill where the Athenian Assembly or ecclesia regularly meets to discuss matters of state).

A series of important speakers addresses the assembly but the subject is not peace and, true to his earlier promise, Dikaiopolis comments loudly on their appearance and probable motives.

First of all there is the ambassador who has returned from the Persian court after many years, complaining of the lavish hospitality he has had to endure from his Persian hosts; then there is the Persian grandee, The Eye of the Great King, Pseudartabas, sporting a gigantic eye and mumbling gibberish, accompanied by some eunuchs who turn out to be a disreputable pair of effete Athenians in disguise; next is the ambassador recently returned from Thrace, blaming the icy conditions in the north for his long stay there at the public's expense; and lastly there is the rabble of Odomantians who are presented as elite mercenaries willing to fight for Athens but who hungrily steal the protagonist's lunch.

He even says that he is willing to speak with his head on a chopping block, if only they will hear him out, and yet he knows how unpredictable his fellow citizens can be: he says he hasn't forgotten how Cleon dragged him into court over "last year's play."

This mention of trouble with Cleon over a play indicates that Dikaiopolis represents Aristophanes (or possibly his producer, Callistratus),[4] and maybe the author is in fact the actor behind the mask.

[5] 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.

Dikaiopolis and Lamachus retire to their separate houses, and there then follows a parabasis in which the Chorus first lavishes exaggerated praise upon the author and next laments the ill treatment that old men like themselves suffer at the hands of slick lawyers in these fast times.

A starving Megarian trades his famished daughters, disguised as piglets, for garlic and salt (products in which Megara had abounded in pre-war days).

Another sycophant happens to arrive at that very moment, and he tries to confiscate the birds and eels, but instead he is packed in straw like a piece of pottery and carried off back home by the Boeotian.

The Spartans and their allies had been invading Attica every year, burning, looting and vandalizing farm property with unusual ferocity in order to provoke the Athenians into a land battle that they couldn't win.

It was a war of attrition, it had already resulted in daily privations, in starvation and plague, and yet democratic Athens continued to be guided by the pro-war faction led by Cleon and exemplified by tough-minded militarists such as Lamachus.

The Spartans were the dominant military power on the Greek mainland, and consequently Athenians were reluctant to venture on foot far from the safety of their own city walls.

[60] Similarly, the old Acharnians sing lovingly of their farms,[61] they express hatred of the enemy for destroying their vines,[62] and they regard the Athenian agora as a place crowded with people that are best avoided.

He subsequently presents the anti-war argument with his head on a chopping block, a humorous reference to the danger that the satirist puts himself in when he impugns the motives of influential men like Cleon.

The following dramatic elements contain variations from convention: Other points of interest: The standard scholarly edition of the play is S. Douglas Olson (ed.