Silent Roles The Wasps (Classical Greek: Σφῆκες, romanized: Sphēkes) is the fourth in chronological order of the eleven surviving plays by Aristophanes.

[3] The play begins with a strange scene—a large net has been spread over a house, the entry is barricaded and two slaves, Xanthias and Sosias, are sleeping in the street outside.

[4] Counselling, medical treatment and travel have all failed to solve the problem, and now his son has turned the house into a prison to keep the old man away from the law courts.

The household settles down for some more sleep and then the Chorus arrives—old jurors who move warily through the muddy roads and are escorted by boys with lamps through the dark.

Bdelycleon responds to these points with the argument that jurors are in fact subject to the demands of petty officials and they get paid less than they deserve—revenues from the empire go mostly into the private treasuries of men like Cleon.

Philocleon refuses to give up his old ways, so Bdelycleon offers to turn the house into a courtroom and to pay him a juror's fee to judge domestic disputes.

It praises the older generation, evokes memories of the victory at Marathon, and bitterly deplores the gobbling up of imperial revenues by unworthy men.

He is addicted to his old juryman's cloak and his old shoes and he is suspicious of the fancy woollen garment and the fashionable Spartan footwear that Bdelycleon wants him to wear that evening to a sophisticated dinner party.

There is then a second parabasis (see Note at end of this section), in which the Chorus touches briefly on a conflict between Cleon and the author, after which a household slave arrives with news for the audience about the old man's appalling behaviour at the dinner party: Philocleon has got himself abusively drunk, he has insulted all his son's fashionable friends, and now he is assaulting anyone he meets on the way home.

Constitutionally, supreme power lay with the People as voters in the assembly and as jurors in the courts, but they could be manipulated by demagogues skilled in oratory and supported by networks of satellites and informers.

[5] Cleon had succeeded Pericles as the dominant speaker in the assembly, and increasingly he could manipulate the courts for political and personal ends, especially in the prosecution of public officials for mismanagement of their duties.

[6] Jurors had to be citizens over the age of thirty and a corps of 6,000 was enrolled at the beginning of each year, forming a conspicuous presence about town in their short brown cloaks, with wooden staves in their hands.

[7] Aristophanes' plays promote conservative values and support an honourable peace with Sparta, whereas Cleon was a radical democrat and a leader of the pro-war faction.

The second parabasis in The Wasps implies that Cleon retaliated for his drubbing in The Knights with yet further efforts to intimidate or prosecute Aristophanes, and the poet may have publicly yielded to this pressure for a short time.

The Chorus leader's boy takes full advantage of the situation, threatening to abandon his elderly father if he won't buy him some figs.