The Clouds is a Greek comedy play written by the playwright Aristophanes. A lampooning of intellectual fashions in classical Athens, it was originally produced at the City Dionysia in 423 BC and was not as well received as the author had hoped, coming last of the three plays competing at the festival that year. It was revised between 420 and 417 BC and was thereafter circulated in manuscript form.
Strepsiades, his son, and Socrates (from a 16th-century engraving)
Ancient Greek comedy was one of the final three principal dramatic forms in the theatre of classical Greece. Athenian comedy is conventionally divided into three periods: Old Comedy, Middle Comedy, and New Comedy. Old Comedy survives today largely in the form of the eleven surviving plays of Aristophanes; Middle Comedy is largely lost, i.e. preserved only in relatively short fragments by authors such as Athenaeus of Naucratis; and New Comedy is known primarily from the substantial papyrus fragments of Menander.
Actor on a Sicilian red-figured calyx-krater (c. 350–340 BC).
Terracotta comic theatre mask, 4th/3rd century BC (Stoa of Attalus, Athens)
Marble image of a theatre mask, 2nd-century BC.
An actor in the mask of a bald man, 2nd century BC
