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Erik Dempsey, John Gibert, Amy Nendza, and the anonymous reviewers of the Review of Politics have helped me improve this paper a great deal; its remaining weaknesses are of course my responsibility.
Introduction
The Birds' lead character is outrageous: he abandons his homeland, enlists allies, leads them in an attack on Zeus and the Olympian gods, becomes tyrannos over these same allies, does not shrink from grilling and basting some of them on his barbeque, and overthrows Zeus while securing for himself his right-hand girl, the beautiful Basileia, among whose gifts is the stash of Zeus's powers, including his feared thunderbolt.1 But as outrageous as this Peisetairos is, Aristophanes is even more outrageous: the poet could have made Peisetairos into a grim or ridiculous reminder to other would-be tyrants, a defeated threat to Athenian democracy, piety, and virtue as demonstrated at Marathon. Instead, Aristophanes ends the play with this shocking character on center stage as a complete success: the last line of the play even marks his apotheosis as "the highest of the divinities."2 The same author who ended an earlier play by burning down the school of a teacher whose radical thoughts wreaked havoc with but a single Athenian father, now allows the hero of the Birds not only to criticize Zeus but to defy and even unseat him. An explanation is in order.
Of course, one response is to deny that such an explanation is really required. It is a wild and crazy comedy, after all, and the Athenians' long war with Sparta surely made some of them eager for diversions. Indeed, the play is not merely a comedy, like the overtly political Knights, for example; it is a fantasy whose events are as impossible as those of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Was Aristophanes not more concerned to divert his viewers than to offer a thoughtful assessment of a new prince like Peisetairos?3 The whole of what follows constitutes an answer to the preceding question: I find the issues addressed by the play to be deadly serious, and there is no reason to assume that humor, even fantastic humor, must preclude thought rather than stimulate it. But I shall also...