The Birds

The foundation of Cloudcuckooland builds on the theme of The Relationship Between Humanity and Animals. Though a city by and for the birds, Cloudcuckooland is conceived in very human terms. Just like any of the city-states of ancient Greece, Cloudcuckooland is given a name and a patron god (or, rather, a patron bird). Sacrifices and rituals inaugurate the foundation. The city is even given a wall like a human city, a detail that seems incongruous for a city in the sky inhabited by birds. The gulf between human and bird is thus gradually effaced.

This effacement is anticipated in the first part of the play, where the birds talk just like humans, but becomes even more obvious in the second part of the play when Euelpides and Peisetairos come on stage wearing their new wings. The humans thus become like the birds even as the birds become like humans—for now, at least, it appears as though the human-animal binary does not even exist, suggesting an erosion of the usual human-centric hierarchy in nature and speaking to Fantasy and the Transgression of Natural Laws.

The building of Cloudcuckooland is accompanied by a series of successive episodes featuring the less desirable elements of human society that try to find a place in the new city. These episodes feature the stock character of the impostor, sometimes known by the Greek term alazon. The alazon character was popular in ancient comedy. In Aristophanes’s The Birds, figures such as the Priest, the Poet, and the Oracle-Monger represent alazones. By chasing these alazones away, Peisetairos makes a utopian statement about what kind of city Cloudcuckooland will be: a city that will shake off those who drain and exploit its resources, a city where “there’s a popular feeling / It’s time to use our fists on all impostors!” (1014-15). In featuring and mocking these stock types in the urban landscape, Aristophanes satirizes the urban life of Athens and other Greek city-states.

At first, the society the birds are building is presented as a true utopia. The birds certainly represent the benefits they offer humanity in the best light:

My eyes survey the whole of earth,

I keep its copious fruits quite safe

By killing teeming broods of beasts

Who feed on all that grows in soil,

Crushing the produce of plants in omnivorous jaws,

And sitting on branches devouring the fruit of the trees (1061-66).

Utopian as it seems, however, Cloudcuckooland is also conceived as a superpower, complete with martial and imperial elements that will become even more prominent after the second Parabasis. Already in the first lines of the second Parabasis, the birds refer to themselves as “all-seeing deity / All-puissant god” (1058-59, emphasis added), betraying the heady extent of their ambitions. Cloudcuckooland, whether utopia or dystopia, is also something more: It is a society that is Challenging the Supremacy of the Gods and aspiring to take the place of the gods themselves.