42 pages • 1 hour read
AristophanesThe Birds
Fiction | Play | Adult | BCEA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Challenging the Supremacy of the Gods
Aristophanes’s The Birds explores the relationship between humanity and the gods of traditional Greek religion. With the birds as their intermediaries, the human characters of the play seek to redefine their status in relation to the gods, building Cloudcuckooland and soon forcing the gods to give up their power. The play subverts the traditional universal hierarchy of Greek religion while removing the gap between humans and their gods, thus challenging the supremacy of the divine Olympians.
The play begins with Peisetairos and Euelpides, Aristophanes’s human heroes, arriving in the land of the birds on a mission to escape the daily cares and tedium of the earthly realm. At this stage, Peisetairos and Euelpides seem motivated above all by a nostalgia for a happy bygone golden age, associated elsewhere in Greek literature with the period of Cronus, Zeus’s predecessor as ruler of the gods. However, these escapist motives rapidly change into something very different when Peisetairos proposes his plan for Cloudcuckooland: From the very beginning, Cloudcuckooland is conceived as a city that will enable a paradigm shift in the relationship between humans, birds, and the gods.
Peisetairos’s plans for Cloudcuckooland are founded on the idea that the birds would make better gods than the traditional gods, but also on the idea that the gap between humans, birds, and gods is not really all that insuperable: In the fantasy world of Aristophanes’s play, the gods starve if deprived of humanity’s sacrifices and are like humans in other ways as well. In one episode, Peisetairos manipulates Herakles by convincing him that his illegitimacy will prevent him from inheriting anything from Zeus, even though such issues of inheritance cannot apply in the case of an immortal being such as Zeus. Peisetairos conveniently ignores the technicality of Zeus’s immortality, just as he ignores the immortality of all the gods throughout the play, as if refusing to acknowledge their special status over humans.
The gods are brought closer not only to humans but also to the birds. When Peisetairos urges the birds to take over the functions of the gods, he convinces the birds that the gods are not so different from them after all:
Look at Hermes:
He too’s a god but flies with wings; and so do many others.
There’s Nike, with her golden plumes, and then again there’s Eros.
And Iris too: for Homer said she’s ‘like a quivering dove.’
And doesn’t Zeus’s thunder bring ‘a wingéd lightning bolt’? (573-77).
As the play progresses, Peisetairos increasingly assumes a godlike role, and Cloudcuckooland increasingly comes to look like an excuse for him to augment his own power. By the end of the play, Peisetairos has almost literally become the new Zeus, lording himself over the stage in a chariot as he wields the scepter and thunderbolts of the supreme god. The play thus casts doubt on the justice and even legitimacy of the gods while at the same time suggesting that those who would wish to defy such supreme authority, like Peisetairos, oppose such power only because they wish to seize it for themselves. For even though it is the bird city of Cloudcuckooland that allows the gods to be unseated, the triumph of Peisetairos—who remains a human figure despite the wings he has put on—highlights that it is really human ambition and ingenuity that has won the day.
The Relationship Between Humanity and Animals
In the world of Aristophanes’s The Birds, the relationship between humanity and animals features much of the same ambivalence as the relationship between humanity and the gods. The birds, of course, are pivotal in the play, representing a distinct realm between the realms of the gods above and humanity below. Aristophanes’s birds are intelligent beings capable of communication and reasoning and are shown to be immensely industrious when properly organized and motivated. Nevertheless, the apparent undermining of the traditional human-animal hierarchy is initially subverted only to be reinforced at the play’s end.
At first, the play subverts the great gap between humanity and animals, much as it subverts the gap between humanity and the gods. When Peisetairos and Euelpides are accepted into the bird community, they are given a special root that allows them to grow wings, just like birds. Many of the birds are likened to humans and associated with human professions (e.g., the “snipper bird”). In a similar fashion, humans and gods are on a few occasions likened to birds or animals. Significantly, the Hoopoe and his family—the first of the talking birds in the play—were originally a human family.
The birds are thus in many ways similar to human beings, but there are also marked contrasts between the birds—and indeed the other animals—and humanity. Aristophanes’s humans, including Peisetairos and Euelpides, have a dangerous and ambitious streak. At the beginning of the play, the birds are terrified of their human visitors: They claim that the Hoopoe has “transgressed [their] ancient laws” (331) by bringing Peisetairos and Euelpides into their territory, viewing humans as their enemies and declaring that “treacherous always, in all respects / Is human nature” (451-52). Although the birds are persuaded to work together by Peisetairos in building Cloudcuckooland, this collaboration soon enough seems to turn into the submission of the birds to a new human overlord, with Peisetairos himself described as a “supreme ruler” (1708), or tyrannos, by the end of the play.
Thus, even as the gaps between humans, animals, and gods are subverted, a clear hierarchy nevertheless emerges—a hierarchy that places humanity on top. For all the professed avian aspirations of Cloudcuckooland, it is significant that the idea comes from Peisetairos, a human being, with Peisetairos remaining more human than bird-like even after he becomes winged. In the end, the birds may nominally succeed in wresting power from the gods, but it is really the human Peisetairos who triumphs, suggesting that the animal world of Aristophanes’s fantasy has merely exchanged masters.
Fantasy and the Transgression of Natural Laws
Aristophanes’s The Birds is generally regarded as the most important ancient Greek example of fantasy literature before the satirical writings of Lucian of Samosata in the second century CE. In creating a bird city, Cloudcuckooland, the characters attempt to overturn all natural laws and boundaries in the process. By the end of the play, the birds of Cloudcuckooland wrest control of the cosmos from the gods themselves, but their transgressions do not succeed in fully overturning nature’s laws, suggesting that true transgression remains a fantasy even in the world of the play.
The representation of birds is central to the fantasy of the play. Aristophanes’s birds are industrious and possess the potential for great power. They can speak, just like human beings, and are quickly able to build a city on the human model. The traditional association of birds with the divine in Greek religion and mythology is taken to an extreme, with the birds adopting a cosmology that makes them the rightful rulers of the world. As Cloudcuckooland grows, Peisetairos maneuvers things so that the birds assert their dominance over humans and gods alike. The birds thus transgress the traditional order of things in a comical and even absurd manner.
Cloudcuckooland is itself an obvious transgression of the laws of nature. The bird city is walled and gated but also floats, apparently, in mid-air. The goddess Iris can fly through the city without realizing what she is doing until she is attacked by sentries and intercepted by Peisetairos. At the same time, human visitors such as the Father-Beater can reach the city, even receiving wings. At any given moment and in any given scene, it is ambiguous whether the action is set in the sky or on the earth. This ambiguity is also a part of the play’s fantasy.
The play also advances a fantastical and utopian vision of what the universe would look like if it were governed by birds:
So if you treat us as your gods,
We’ll sing our oracles to you
Through all the seasons of the year,
In winter, summer, cold and heat.
We’ll never fly and sulk on high,
The way that Zeus hides in the clouds.
We’ll always give to each of you,
And to your families evermore,
Great wealth-and-health, long lives of peace,
With youth and laughter, dancing, feasts (722-32).
In short, the birds can take care of humans—and even the gods—better than any other beings. Cloudcuckooland is conceived as a true utopia, with undesirable elements of human society—Oracle Mongers, Informants, and other charlatans—violently cast out.
However, Peisetairos’s increasingly authoritarian behavior toward the play’s end—with him even helping himself to a platter of cooked birds during his negotiations with the embassy of the gods—raises questions about whether this new regime is truly an improvement, while elements of familiar Athenian imperialism creep into the impossible city in the clouds. With the grandiose triumph of Peisetairos in the final scene, the play suggests that transgression and radical upheaval in the natural order remain an impossible fantasy—a meditation on the absurdity of human aspirations and ambitions.
Related Titles
By Aristophanes
