The Birds by Aristophanes

1/ The premise is simple: two Athenian men Peisetairus and Euelpides, fed up with the world in which they live, go to the land of the birds and set up a utopia in the sky called Cloudcuckooland. 

The Birds, performed in 414 BC, is the longest Aristophanes play that survives. 

2/ This is an interesting speech from the birds, addressing humans: 

“LEADER Listen, you mortals, you half-alive pests, 

you bundle of leaves, you clay, 

Race of shadows, wingless and weak 

suffering things of a day. 

You shades of a dream, poor mortals attend us, 

us the truly immortal. 

Us everlasting, ageless and always, 

us the only eternal…” 

That comes from the translation by Paul Roche. Here are the same lines as translated by Ian Johnston: 

“CHORUS LEADER Come now, you men out there, who live such dark, sad lives—

you’re frail, just like a race of leaves—you’re shaped from clay,

you tribes of insubstantial shadows without wings,

you creatures of a day, unhappy mortal men,

you figures from a dream, now turn your minds to us,

the eternal, deathless, air-borne, ageless birds,

whose wisdom never dies, so you may hear from us…” 

3/ Peisetairus doesn’t just reject the world of humans; he rejects gods. 

“PEISETAIRUS It follows then 

that if the birds were born before 

Mother Earth 

and before the gods, they are 

heirs of royalty.” 

(translated by Paul Roche) 

He becomes a bird. 

“PEISETAIRUS But if they accept you as their god, as their Zeus, 

as their Mother Earth, their Poseidon, their Cronus, 

then let every blessing be theirs.” 

Peisetairus persuades the birds to take control of the sky and wage war against the gods: 

“PEISETAIRUS […] And just as we have to ask for visas from the Boeotians

when we want to visit Delphi, so will humans 

when they sacrifice to the gods have to get visas 

from you for the savory smell of fried bacon 

to reach heaven.” 

He rejects the gods and at the end becomes a god himself. That is quite blasphemous—no? I wonder what the audience thought. 

Wikipedia tells me The Birds has been much analysed. What is its meaning? Is it a satire? An allegory? Or escapist entertainment? I don’t know. But the main thing is that the play is funny, and full of funny lines. 

“SERVANT Not that. It’s simply that when my master 

turned into a hoopoe, he prayed 

that I should turn bird, too, 

so’s he’d still have a valet and a butler.” 

Or: 

“LEADER [to the audience] 

For sheer enjoyment nothing can beat 

putting on wings. 

If for instance one of you had 

a pair of the things 

And became hungry and terribly bored 

with a tragic play, 

He could simply up it from here 

and fly away…” 

On a side note, I wish we had some plays of the fourth and fifth greatest Greek tragedians, just to see the gap between Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and them (the same way we can’t fully appreciate how extraordinary Shakespeare was till we read his contemporaries). 

If you look on Wikipedia, you can see that the play is filled with references to places and writers and politicians and historical figures and mythical figures and other people. However, The Birds is not about a “current issue” in the way that The Clouds is. Some of the characters are recognisable types: fraud, father beater, inspector, informer, and so on. 

“METON I’ve come to survey the air for you 

and partition it into lots.” 

I do love it though when I get the reference:  

“PROMETHEUS […] That’s the reason I hurried here, to put you in the know. 

I always was a friend to man.

PEISETAIRUS Indeed, you are. Without you, we couldn’t even 

barbecue.” 

The play is funny from beginning to end—from Peisetairus and Euelpides’s conversation with the birds, to Peisetairus’s responses to the frauds and other annoying types trying to enter the kingdom, to his negotiations with the gods Poseidon, Heracles, and Triballus. He wants not only Zeus’s sceptre but also the princess (“who takes care of Zeus’s thunderbolts/ and other paraphernalia such as/ foreign affairs, law and order, harbor dues, the shipping plan,/ paymasters, jury fees, and vituperating dolts”): 

“HERACLES […] Are we going to go to war over a single woman?”  

That line must have tickled Aristophanes’s audience. 

The Birds has a light touch and joyful ending that I didn’t see in The Clouds. It’s fun.