An Obscure
Comedy
by Alex Andy Phuong
Aristophanes
is a playwright who is very skilled at comedy. Some
of his plays, like Lysistrata,
explore what it means to be human through plots
filled with humorous elements. The
Acharnians might not be as well-known
as some of the famous tragedies of playwrights
like Euripides, but this play essentially
satirizes tragedy by including Euripides himself
as a character. Essentially, The
Acharnians is a drama that is not as
well-known as Aristophanes other plays, like Clouds or Lysistrata,
but still captures the essence of the historical
period in which it was written by interweaving
current events at that time into the plot of the
play.
In
this play, the plot centers upon an old farmer
named Dikaiopolis, who appears at the beginning
of the play by sitting on the Pnyx. He
grew tired about the sheer length of the
Peloponnesian War, and he also wants to go back
home to the village where he originally resides. He
also thinks that the people at Athens had spent
too much time arguing about the war itself, and
he yearns for the end of this war so that he can
find peace at last.
The
play is much more than simply a humorous
production because it attempts to provide social
commentary on the people that were alive during
the life of Aristophanes. In a way,
Aristophanes employs humor to show how even
sometimes the great tragedians are not that
dignified because of the simple fact that famous
playwrights are just as human as everyone else. The
protagonist is a farmer, and so were many others
from that historical era. In the end,
this play is an example of farce because of its
absurdity during a historical period filled with
tension, such as the warfare that happened
between different types of people. Nevertheless,
differing individuals are all just as human as
the people that were fighting against one another.
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