The Birds
Two men fed up with Athenian politics decide to build a city in the sky.
414 BC
Introduction
Aristophanes’s absurd play is two and half thousand years old, but its satire is as fresh today as it ever has been.
TWO men from Athens, that cradle of democracy, were fed up with the childish politicking and squabbles about laws.
Imagine, said Pisthetaerus to his friend Euelpides, that we were birds! We could build ourselves a city in the sky, and get away from it all.
A king named Tereus was rumoured to have turned into a bird, so they went to find him.
Tereus, now a rather scruffy Hoopoe, was excited by the plan, and summoned birds from all corners of Greece to help build their city-in-the-sky, Cloudcuckooland, promising the birds that they would reclaim from the Olympians their rightful place as the true gods.
As for men, Tereus’s pretty wife Nightingale assured them that birds would not live on a distant mountain, like Zeus, but among them, showering them with health, wealth, and ease. Moreover, birds have quite different, and much less demanding, standards of morality.
Not surprisingly, news of the city-in-the-sky began to spread like wildfire.