The Acharnians or Acharnians is the third play — and the earliest of the eleven surviving plays — by the Athenian playwright Aristophanes. It was produced in 425 BC on behalf of the young dramatist by an associate, Callistratus, and it won first place at the Lenaia festival.
The tipsy god: sculpture by Michelangelo. The Dramatis Personae in ancient comedy depends on interpretation of textual evidence. This list is based on Alan Sommerstein's translation.
Aristophanes was an Ancient Greek comic playwright from Athens and a poet of Old Attic Comedy. He wrote in total forty plays, of which eleven survive virtually complete today. These provide the most valuable examples of a genre of comic drama known as Old Comedy and are used to define it, along with fragments from dozens of lost plays by Aristophanes and his contemporaries.
Bust of Aristophanes (1st century AD)
Theatre of Dionysus, Athens – in Aristophanes' time, the audience probably sat on wooden benches with earth foundations.
Muse reading, Louvre
Thalia, muse of comedy, gazing upon a comic mask (detail from Muses' Sarcophagus)