The Birds

Two disgruntled Athenians flee their city's corruption to found the most absurd utopia in literature: a city in the sky built by birds. Pisthetaerus and his companion seek out Epops, the King of Birds, and pitch their grand scheme, Cloudcuckooland will block all communication between humans and gods, forcing the Olympians to negotiate or starve. What follows is a spectacular escalation as the birds become arbiters of cosmic power, and the clever Athenian transforms from refugee to ruler of both feathered kingdom and divine realm. Aristophanes wrote this during the Peloponnesian War, when Athens was devouring itself, and the play's targets are unmistakable: democratic demagogues, imperial ambition, poetic pretension, and the entire apparatus of power that convinced men they could rule the world. The comedy is bawdy, the logic is mad, and the satire cuts to bone. Six centuries before the birth of Christ, Aristophanes invented high comedy as a weapon of dissent, and The Birds remains his most fantastical, most gleefully irreverent assault on the serious business of politics.