Aristophanes was an Ancient Greek comic playwright from Athens and a poet of Old Attic Comedy. He wrote in total forty plays, of which eleven survive virtually complete today. These provide the most valuable examples of a genre of comic drama known as Old Comedy and are used to define it, along with fragments from dozens of lost plays by Aristophanes and his contemporaries.
Euripides was a tragedian of classical Athens. Along with Aeschylus and Sophocles, he is one of the three ancient Greek tragedians for whom any plays have survived in full. Some ancient scholars attributed ninety-five plays to him, but the Suda says it was ninety-two at most. Of these, eighteen or nineteen have survived more or less complete. There are many fragments of most of his other plays. More of his plays have survived intact than those of Aeschylus and Sophocles together, partly because his popularity grew as theirs declined—he became, in the Hellenistic Age, a cornerstone of ancient literary education, along with Homer, Demosthenes, and Menander.
The Thesmophoria was an ancient Greek religious festival, held in honor of the goddess Demeter and her daughter Persephone. It was held annually, mostly around the time that seeds were sown in late autumn – though in some places it was associated with the harvest instead – and celebrated human and agricultural fertility. The festival was one of the most widely celebrated in the Greek world. It was restricted to adult women, and the rites practised during the festival were kept secret. The most extensive sources on the festival are a comment in a scholion on Lucian, explaining the festival, and Aristophanes' play Thesmophoriazusae, which parodies the festival.
In Greek mythology, Aerope was a Cretan princess as the daughter of Catreus, king of Crete. She was the sister to Clymene, Apemosyne and Althaemenes. Aerope's father Catreus gave her to Nauplius, to be drowned, or sold abroad, but Nauplius spared her, and she became the wife of Atreus, or Pleisthenes, and by most accounts the mother of Agamemnon and Menelaus. While the wife of Atreus, she became the lover of his brother Thyestes, and gave Thyestes the golden lamb, by which he became the king of Mycenae.
In ancient Greek religion and mythology, Iacchus was a minor deity, of some cultic importance, particularly at Athens and Eleusis in connection with the Eleusinian mysteries, but without any significant mythology. He perhaps originated as the personification of the ritual exclamation Iacche! cried out during the Eleusinian procession from Athens to Eleusis. He was often identified with Dionysus, perhaps because of the resemblance of the names Iacchus and Bacchus, another name for Dionysus. By various accounts he was a son of Demeter, or a son of Persephone, identical with Dionysus Zagreus, or a son of Dionysus.
In Greek mythology, Erebus, or Erebos, is the personification of darkness. In Hesiod's Theogony, he is the offspring of Chaos, and the father of Aether and Hemera (Day) by Nyx (Night); in other Greek cosmogonies, he is the father of Aether, Eros, and Metis, or the first ruler of the gods.
Diogenes of Apollonia was an ancient Greek philosopher, and was a native of the Milesian colony Apollonia in Thrace. He lived for some time in Athens. He believed air to be the one source of all being from which all other substances were derived, and, as a primal force, to be both divine and intelligent. He also wrote a description of the organization of blood vessels in the human body. His ideas were parodied by the dramatist Aristophanes, and may have influenced the Orphic philosophical commentary preserved in the Derveni papyrus. His philosophical work has not survived in a complete form, and his doctrines are known chiefly from lengthy quotations of his work by Simplicius, as well as a few summaries in the works of Aristotle, Theophrastus, and Aetius.
The Birds is a comedy by the Ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes. It was performed in 414 BC at the City Dionysia in Athens where it won second place. It has been acclaimed by modern critics as a perfectly realized fantasy remarkable for its mimicry of birds and for the gaiety of its songs. Unlike the author's other early plays, it includes no direct mention of the Peloponnesian War and there are few references to Athenian politics, and yet it was staged not long after the commencement of the Sicilian Expedition, an ambitious military campaign that greatly increased Athenian commitment to the war effort. In spite of that, the play has many indirect references to Athenian political and social life. It is the longest of Aristophanes's surviving plays and yet it is a fairly conventional example of Old Comedy.
The Apology of Socrates, written by Plato, is a Socratic dialogue of the speech of legal self-defence which Socrates spoke at his trial for impiety and corruption in 399 BC.
Ancient Greek literature is literature written in the Ancient Greek language from the earliest texts until the time of the Byzantine Empire. The earliest surviving works of ancient Greek literature, dating back to the early Archaic period, are the two epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey, set in an idealized archaic past today identified as having some relation to the Mycenaean era. These two epics, along with the Homeric Hymns and the two poems of Hesiod, the Theogony and Works and Days, constituted the major foundations of the Greek literary tradition that would continue into the Classical, Hellenistic, and Roman periods.
Eupolis was an Athenian poet of the Old Comedy, who flourished during the time of the Peloponnesian War.
Ancient Greek comedy was one of the final three principal dramatic forms in the theatre of classical Greece. Athenian comedy is conventionally divided into three periods: Old Comedy, Middle Comedy, and New Comedy. Old Comedy survives today largely in the form of the eleven surviving plays of Aristophanes; Middle Comedy is largely lost, i.e. preserved only in relatively short fragments by authors such as Athenaeus of Naucratis; and New Comedy is known primarily from the substantial papyrus fragments of Menander.
Old Comedy is the first period of the ancient Greek comedy, according to the canonical division by the Alexandrian grammarians. The most important Old Comic playwright is Aristophanes – whose works, with their daring political commentary and abundance of sexual innuendo, de facto define the genre. It is important to note that the only extant plays of Old Comedy are credited to Aristophanes. There are only fragments and 'testimonia' of all other Old Comedy playwrights and plays.
Philoxenus of Cythera was a Greek dithyrambic poet, an exponent of the "New Music". He was one of the most important dithyrambic poets of ancient Greece.
In Greek mythology, Nauplius is the name of one mariner heroes. Whether these should be considered to be the same person, or two or possibly three distinct persons, is not entirely clear. The most famous Nauplius, was the father of Palamedes, called Nauplius the Wrecker, because he caused the Greek fleet, sailing home from the Trojan War, to shipwreck, in revenge for the unjust killing of Palamedes. This Nauplius was also involved in the stories of Aerope, the mother of Agamemnon and Menelaus, and Auge, the mother of Telephus. The mythographer Apollodorus says he was the same as the Nauplius who was the son of Poseidon and Amymone. Nauplius was also the name of one of the Argonauts, and although Apollonius of Rhodes made the Argonaut a direct descendant of the son of Poseidon, the Roman mythographer Hyginus makes them the same person. However, no surviving ancient source identifies the Argonaut with the father of Palamedes.
In Greek mythology, Eros is the Greek god of love and sex. His Roman counterpart is Cupid ('desire'). In the earliest account, he is a primordial god, while in later accounts he is described as one of the children of Aphrodite and Ares and, with some of his siblings, was one of the Erotes, a group of winged love gods.
Ceto is a primordial sea goddess in Greek mythology, the daughter of Pontus and his mother, Gaia. As a mythological figure, she is considered to be one of the most ancient deities, and bore a host of monstrous children fathered by Phorcys, another child of Gaia and Pontus. The small Solar System body 65489 Ceto was named after her, and its satellite after Phorcys.
Slavery was a widely accepted practice in ancient Greece, as it was in contemporaneous societies. The principal use of slaves was in agriculture, but they were also used in stone quarries or mines, as domestic servants, or even as a public utility, as with the demosioi of Athens.
In Classical Athens, there was no exact equivalent of the English term "adultery", but the similar moicheia was a criminal offence often translated as adultery by scholars. Athenian moicheia was restricted to illicit sex with free women, and so men could legally have extra-marital sex with slaves and prostitutes. Famously, Athenian culture and adultery laws considered seduction of a citizen woman a worse crime than rape.
The Scythian archers were a hypothesized police force of 5th- and early 4th-century BC Athens that is recorded in some Greek artworks and literature. The force is said to have consisted of 300 armed Scythians who were public slaves in Athens. They acted on behalf of a group of eleven elected Athenian magistrates "who were responsible for arrests and executions and for some aspects of public order" in the city. Despite being called "archers", the Scythian police probably did not use bows and arrows.
