054 Old Comedy and Aristophanes

In this episode, we discuss the Lenaia festival, the intricacies of Athenian Old Comedy, and what is known about the lives and works of the earliest comedic poets, including Aristophanes, whose eleven surviving works effectively define the genre today (His plays were not covered in great detail in this episode, though, because unlike the tragic plays of Sophocles and Euripides, which were also produced with the backdrop of the Peloponnesian War, the humor of Aristophanes’ comedic plays will be much easier to understand and more valuable if discussed in the historical times that they were produced, and so they will be covered during the upcoming Peloponnesian War)