Aristophanes

A page from Codex Ravennas 429 (Biblioteca Classense, Ravenna), the mid-tenth-century manuscript that is the oldest and only medieval witness to all eleven surviving comedies of Aristophanes. Written in Greek minuscule around 950 CE with scholia in the margins, the codex is the sole source from which the Thesmophoriazusae and roughly a quarter of the Lysistrata survive the Middle Ages.

Lysistrata · Thesmophoriazusae · Ecclesiazusae · Plutus

Four comedies of Aristophanes — the sex-strike politics of Lysistrata, the festival travesty of Thesmophoriazusae, the communist fantasy of Ecclesiazusae, and the redistributive dream of Plutus — spanning Old Comedy at its height and the threshold of its transformation.