The Birds

Fiction | Play | Adult | BCE

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Lines 1-800

Lines 801-1117

Lines 1118-1763

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Symbols & Motifs

Avian Imagery

It goes without saying that avian or bird imagery would be an important motif in a play titled The Birds, yet the prominence of birds in Aristophanes’s play goes far beyond what is necessitated by the plot. Animal choruses were common in Old Comedy (compare Aristophanes’s Wasps and Frogs), but the birds of The Birds are on a different caliber altogether. The birds making up the Chorus—all 24 of them—are described in detail by Peisetairos and Euelpides as they flock onto the stage. Each of these birds of the chorus, moreover, represents a different species, and all but one correspond to real bird species (the “snipper” bird is a fiction). Ornithological humor continues to inform the rest of the play, such as in Aristophanes’s description of the birds’ building of the walls of Cloudcuckooland, a passage rich in avian imagery and puns.

Society

Aristophanes’s The Birds is much concerned with society and the building blocks that constitute it, forming an important motif in the play. Cloudcuckooland is conceived as a city by the birds and for the birds—an idea straight from the realm of fantasy but nevertheless an idea founded on a human conception of society.

In building a society, the birds become almost human, for as Cloudcuckooland takes form, the birds lose many of their distinguishing characteristics. As Peisetairos tells the Hoopoe, the birds’ flighty nature prevents the rest of the world from taking them seriously, so they must lose these characteristics. The foundation of Cloudcuckooland is also immediately marked by the arrival of various human visitors or impostors (alazones). These human impostors—including the Oracle-Monger, Meton the urban planner, and the Informant—represent the various elements of (human) society, most of them undesirable, with whom Peisetairos and the birds must contend as they build their own society. Peisetairos’s rejection of these undesirable building blocks of society underscores the utopian or fantastical aura of Cloudcuckooland, which is initially intended as a very different kind of society—though as the play draws toward its conclusion, Cloudcuckooland already appears to have become as corrupted by ambition and power as any other.

Sound and Speech

Sound and speech are important motifs from the very beginning of the play. On the one hand, Aristophanes has much to say about the sounds—some musical, some silly—produced by birds: The crow that Peisetairos uses as his guide for finding Cloudcuckooland “caws away, but keeps on changing its mind” (24). The Nightingale, wife of the Hoopoe, is distinguished by her melodious voice, her “vibrant throat” (212) and her “sound as sweet as honey” (223), being described as “sweet-tongued […] / The bird who sings just like a Muse” (658-59). The Hoopoe emits a flurry of bird sounds when he first summons the birds (“Hoopoopoo! Poopoopoo!” and so on: 227ff.).

On the other hand, the variety of bird sounds is juxtaposed with human speech, especially as harnessed by Peisetairos, whose ability to use rhetoric to bend the other characters to his will is put on display throughout the play. As Peisetairos tells the Informant, words can be winged too, just like the birds: “For words can make the mind soar high above / And lift us up” (1447-48). Appropriately, it is a symphony of sound and speech, of song, proclamations, and even thunder, that marks the moment of Peisetairos’s triumph in the final scene and exodos (the exit of the actors and Chorus from the stage):