ARISTOPHANES
A talented, charismatic leader, Alcibiades, was deposed by a religiously conservative faction in Athens who condemned him as a heretic to the God Mercury. Alcibiades escaped to the arch enemy, Sparta, where he was welcomed and became a leader there until he had an affair with the Spartan King’s wife. He then worked for the Persians, enemies of all Greeks, and finally was welcomed back to Athens where he was again made a military leader.
Aristophanes (/ˌærɪˈstɒfəniːz/; Ancient Greek: Ἀριστοφάνης, pronounced [aristopʰánɛːs]; c. 446 – c. 386 BC), son of Philippus, of the deme Kydathenaion (Latin: Cydathenaeum), was a comic playwright or comedy-writer of ancient Athens and a poet of Old Attic Comedy. Eleven of his forty plays survive virtually complete. 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.
