Literature and history dot come. Oh, Hello and welcome to literature and history. Episode 35, the Great Thundercrap. In this episode,

we're going to talk about a play called The Clouds, written by the

comedic ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes and first produced in the city of

Athens in 423 b.C.

We have this tendency when we think about ancient Greece.

I think maybe it's because a lot of us encounter ancient Greece for the first time in the works of Plato or in the myths.

And it all seems rather serious.

Those bygone Greeks, we think, wrote epic legends about slaying monsters, Medusas and Minatores and Hydras.

They wrote about wars between nations and they delved into the fine points of ethical philosophy.

We picture them there standing amidst fluted columns and engaging in sober philosophical disputations in between meetings of the Assembly.

They can seem, if we just read, Plato and Sophocles maybe, as composed and dignified as the sculptures they chiseled out of marble 2,500 years ago.

We might have this image of particularly classical Athens as a time and place of dignified

intellectualism, of discipline, of moderation and self-control. We might have this image of Athens if we didn't have a small

handful of texts, the most important among them being the plays of Aristophanes.

And as the great them being the plays of Aristophanes.

And as the great German poet Heinrich Heinas said, there is a God and his name is Aristophanes. This is probably the most famous thing ever said about Aristophanes.

In some ways it's an odd statement about the ancient world's most famous funny man.

Aristophanes' plays are full of farts and poop jokes, bodily orifices, and ridiculous lechery,

x-rated quips about sex and undisguised authorial self-promotion and seen after scene of characters behaving with undignified stupidity and gross selfishness.

If we were looking for someone from ancient Greece to award with the hyperbole of God, Homer seems like the obvious choice.

So why would a writer as accomplished as Heinrich Heina

select this ancient jokester as the deity of all writers.

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