BirdsAristophanes
About Birds
Aristophanes' , produced at the City Dionysia in 414 BC, is the longest of his surviving comedies and his freest flight of invention. Two Athenians, Pisthetaerus and Euelpides, leave the litigious city in search of a quieter life. They find Tereus, once a king and now a hoopoe, and persuade the birds to found a city in the sky. Its name is Nephelokokkygia, Cloudcuckooland. From there the birds will block the smoke of sacrifice, starve the Olympians into submission, and reclaim the status of original gods.
The plan works. Unwelcome visitors (poets, an oracle-monger, the mathematician Meton, inspectors from Athens) are driven off. Iris is intercepted. Prometheus slips down with advice that Zeus is hungry and ready to negotiate. A divine embassy accepts Pisthetaerus' terms. He receives Zeus's sceptre and the maiden Sovereignty, and is proclaimed king of the gods.
The play belongs to Old Comedy's habit of letting a clever citizen remake the world by a single scheme. It takes up government, custom and convention, and the comic side of ambition. Where Plato builds a city in speech to ask what justice is, Aristophanes builds one in the air to ask what happens when human cleverness seizes the machinery of the divine.