[10] His powers of ridicule were feared and acknowledged by influential contemporaries; Plato singled out Aristophanes' play The Clouds as slander that contributed to the trial and subsequent condemning to death of Socrates,[6][11] although other satirical playwrights had also caricatured the philosopher.

It was conventional in Old Comedy for the chorus to speak on behalf of the author during an address called the parabasis, where some biographical facts can usually be found.

The term literally means "teacher," referring primarily to his role in training the chorus in rehearsal, but perhaps also covered his relationship with the audience as a commentator on significant issues.

He caricatured leading figures in the arts (notably Euripides, whose influence on his own work however he once grudgingly acknowledged),[22] in politics (especially the populist Cleon), and in philosophy/religion (where Socrates was the most obvious target).

[24] His plays were written for production at the great dramatic festivals of Athens, the Lenaia and City Dionysia, where they were judged and awarded prizes in competition with the works of other comic dramatists.

The day's program at the City Dionysia for example was crowded, with three tragedies and a satyr play ahead of a comedy, but it is possible that many of the poorer citizens (typically the main supporters of demagogues like Cleon) occupied the festival holiday with other pursuits.

Throughout most of Aristophanes' career, the Chorus was essential to a play's success and it was recruited and funded by a choregus, a wealthy citizen appointed to the task by one of the archons.

By the time his last play was produced (around 386 BC) Athens had been defeated in war, its empire had been dismantled and it had undergone a transformation from being the political to the intellectual centre of Greece.

The details of the trial are unrecorded but, speaking through the hero of his third play The Acharnians (staged at the Lenaia, where there were few or no foreign dignitaries), the poet carefully distinguishes between the polis and the real targets of his acerbic wit:

ἡμῶν γὰρ ἄνδρες, κοὐχὶ τὴν πόλιν λέγω, μέμνησθε τοῦθ᾽ ὅτι οὐχὶ τὴν πόλιν λέγω, ἀλλ᾽ ἀνδράρια μοχθηρά, παρακεκομμένα...[34] People among us, and I don't mean the polis, Remember this – I don't mean the polis – But wicked little men of a counterfeit kind.... Aristophanes repeatedly savages Cleon in his later plays.

But these satirical diatribes appear to have had no effect on Cleon's political career—a few weeks after the performance of The Knights—a play full of anti-Cleon jokes—Cleon was elected to the prestigious board of ten generals.

[49] Araros is also thought to have been responsible for the posthumous performances of the now lost plays Aeolosicon II and Cocalus,[50] and it is possible that the last of these won the prize at the City Dionysia in 387.

[53] A third son was called either Nicostratus or Philetaerus,[54] and a man by the latter name appears in the catalogue of Lenaia victors with two victories, the first probably in the late 370s.

For example, conversation among the guests turns to the subject of Love and Aristophanes explains his notion of it in terms of an amusing allegory, a device he often uses in his plays.

[65][66] A revival of interest in the Attic dialect may have been responsible for the recovery and circulation of Aristophanes' plays during the fourth and fifth centuries AD, resulting in their survival today.

These include not only rival comic dramatists such as Eupolis and Hermippus[68] and predecessors such as Magnes, Crates and Cratinus,[69] but also tragedians, notably Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, all three of whom are mentioned in e.g.

[87] Some plays feature revelations of human perfectibility that are poetic rather than religious in character, such as the marriage of the hero Pisthetairos to Zeus's paramour in The Birds and the "recreation" of old Athens, crowned with roses, at the end of The Knights.

The tragic dramatists Sophocles and Euripides died near the end of the Peloponnesian War, and the art of tragedy thereafter ceased to develop, yet comedy continued to evolve after the defeat of Athens, and it is possible that it did so because, in Aristophanes, it had a master craftsman who lived long enough to help usher it into a new age.

[104] Aristophanes seems to have had some appreciation of his formative role in the development of comedy, as indicated by his comment in Clouds that his audience would be judged by other times according to its reception of his plays.

[105] Clouds was awarded third (i.e. last) place after its original performance and the text that has come down to the modern age was a subsequent draft that Aristophanes intended to be read rather than acted.

[106] The circulation of his plays in manuscript extended their influence beyond the original audience, over whom in fact they seem to have had little or no practical influence: they did not affect the career of Cleon, they failed to persuade the Athenians to pursue an honourable peace with Sparta and it is not clear that they were instrumental in the trial and execution of Socrates, whose death probably resulted from public animosity towards the philosopher's disgraced associates (such as Alcibiades),[107] exacerbated of course by his own intransigence during the trial.

[108] The plays, in manuscript form, have been put to some surprising uses—as indicated earlier, they were used in the study of rhetoric on the recommendation of Quintilian and by students of the Attic dialect in the Fourth and Fifth Centuries AD.

Goethe (who turned to Aristophanes for a warmer and more vivid form of comedy than he could derive from readings of Terence and Plautus) adapted a short play Die Vögel from The Birds for performance in Weimar.

[110] The avant-gardist stage-director Karolos Koun directed a version of The Birds under the Acropolis in 1959 that established a trend in modern Greek history of breaking taboos through the voice of Aristophanes.

[111] The plays have a significance that goes beyond their artistic function, as historical documents that open the window on life and politics in classical Athens, in which respect they are perhaps as important as the writings of Thucydides.

The standard modern edition of the fragments is Rudolf Kassel and Colin François Lloyd Austin's, Poetae Comici Graeci III.2.