The Birds

About

Aristophanes' The Birds (414 BCE) is his most fantastical and most elaborately staged comedy: two Athenians, tired of the litigious city, persuade the birds to build a new city in the clouds — Cloudcuckooland — and eventually challenge the gods themselves. It is the longest surviving Aristophanes play and the most purely theatrical, with spectacular choral costumes and a plot that escalates from domestic comedy to cosmic satire. Unlike most Aristophanes, The Birds has no clear political target — it reads more as an exercise in pure comic imagination than as topical commentary — which may explain why it has traveled so well across time.