The Birds

At the time Aristophanes produced The Birds, in 414 BCE, the Athenians had just embarked on the Sicilian Expedition. The Sicilian Expedition was a large campaign launched by the Athenian Empire against the city-state of Syracuse in Sicily during the Peloponnesian War. The expedition was proposed by Alcibiades, a prominent Athenian politician and general, as a strategy to expand Athenian power westward. The Athenian military force was made up of some 30,000 soldiers and over 100 warships.

Despite some initial successes, however, the expedition soon stalled. Few Sicilian city-states joined the Athenians, and the Athenians put in charge of the expedition were not up to the task—Alcibiades himself was called back before the fleet reached Sicily and went into exile. In 413, the expedition ended in disaster: The Athenian army was largely destroyed, and many of the survivors were taken prisoner or sold into slavery. The Athenian Empire did recover some of its power in the decade that followed, but the failure of the Sicilian Expedition, combined with internal political turmoil, weakened them considerably. In 404 BCE, the Spartans decisively defeated Athens in the Peloponnesian War.

Many scholars today interpret the play within this historical context. In 414 BCE, when it was first produced, hopes were still running high in Athens. The Athenians still expected the Sicilian Expedition to succeed, and the Athenian Empire was powerful and prosperous. This power and prosperity is reflected in Aristophanes’s The Birds, which seems to have been a particularly lavish and expensive play: The Birds has 22 adult speaking parts, a full Chorus of 24 costumed as colorful birds, and an unusual number of extras. There would have been at least two professional singers involved in the production—one for the Hoopoe and one for the Nightingale—and perhaps a few more too since the play’s choral odes are unusually elegant and musical for a Greek comedy.

Besides being unusually expensive, Aristophanes’s The Birds is also unusual in its relative lack of explicit topical or political references. The Athenian Empire and the Peloponnesian War are hardly mentioned in the play, while in most of Aristophanes’s other plays, these entities are a major force. This does not mean that Aristophanes does not satirize contemporary issues—but in The Birds, uniquely, Aristophanes pokes fun at Athens and the Athenian Empire through fantasy.

Cloudcuckooland can thus be read as a kind of Athens outside of Athens, a replica of the city and its empire that sits somewhere between utopia and dystopia. Indeed, many of the less desirable social elements of Athens make their way to the newly founded Cloudcuckooland, and the birds do not waste any time adopting the expansionist policies of the contemporary Athenians when they declare war on the gods. Nevertheless, the parallels between Cloudcuckooland and the Athenian Empire (or between the birds’ war against the gods and the Sicilian Expedition) remain allusive: Aristophanes keeps to the world of fantasy, limiting the explicit topical references characteristic of other surviving examples of Old Comedy. The result is a truly unique work and the only important example of fantasy in Greek literature until Lucian over five centuries later.