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Creator: Aristophanes

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The familiar chant from The Frogs

Aristophanes was an Athenian comic playwright (5th-4th century BC). His works are often characterized as satire, which is quite remarkable—the Greeks never really went in for satire that much, to the point where they didn't even have a word for it (the genre was considered to be an innovation of the Romans, who were rather fonder of the style).

His notable plays include The Clouds (Νεφέλαι, Nephelai), which famously lampooned Socrates (libeling him, and likely contributing to his sentence of death); The Wasps (Σφῆκες, Sph�kes), a satire of contemporary litigious society; The Birds (Ὄρνιθες, Ornithes), which features the original Cloudcuckooland; Lysistrata (Λυσιστράτη, Lysistrat�), in which the women of Greece bring about the end of a war by going on a sex strike; and The Frogs (Βάτραχοι, Batrachoi), in which Euripides and Aeschylus contend in the afterlife for the title of Best Tragic Poet. (Many of his plays, in what was then a common convention, were named after the role adopted by the Greek Chorus; Lysistrata, named after the lead character, is the only exception out of those listed here.)

The Frogs was loosely adapted into a musical by Stephen Sondheim et al., with William Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw as the contentious dramatists, and a much-expanded role for the frogs.

Trope Namer

Works by Aristophanes with their own trope pages include:

Other works by Aristophanes provide examples of:

Anachronism Stew: Some translations update terminology, and most update as many jokes as possible that the shows may remain side-splitters. For example, at one point in The Frogs, we are given an excerpt from Aeschylus' now-lost play Myrmidons, where the word "striking" figures repeatedly. One translation has Dionysus riffing "You struck out."
Black Comedy Rape
Dirty Old Woman
Gag Penis
Gender Bender: Mnesilochus in The Poet And The Women.
Greek Chorus: Necessarily, for an Ancient Greek playwright.
Hilarity Ensues: Duh
Have You Seen My God?
Leaning on the Fourth Wall
Missing Episode: Not all his plays survived the fall of the Roman Empire.
- Though also something of an inversion- virtually all other examples of Athenian Old Comedy are lost to us, the surviving Aristophanic plays being the only ones remaining.
- Also, The Frogs gives us excerpts of some missing Aeschylus and Euripides plays.
No Fourth Wall
Nostalgia Ain't Like It Used To Be: Aristophanes wasn't fond of modernity and clearly thought that Greece used to be a much sweeter place a few decades before his plays. Since most of his works were written during the Peloponnesian War, he wasn't completely wrong.
Rule of Funny
Swapped Roles: Dionysos and his mortal servant disguise themselves as each other in The Frogs.
Take That: Euripides is one of the most frequent targets. Socrates is a close second - The Clouds is all about what a sleazy fellow Socrates is, and there are various references to him in other plays, none at all flattering. It's often argued that Aristophanes' daemon-ization of Socrates was one reason the Athenians eventually condemned the philosopher to death.
War Is Hell