Aristophanes

Aristophanes (c. 446–c. 386 BC) was an Athenian comic playwright, the only author of Old Comedy whose plays survive complete. Eleven of his forty or so comedies remain, among them The Clouds, which mocks Socrates, The Wasps, The Birds, Lysistrata, in which the women of Greece end a war by refusing their husbands, The Frogs and The Assembly-Women. Writing through the Peloponnesian War, he mixed fantasy, obscenity, personal attack and lyric beauty, and he spared none of the politicians, poets and philosophers of the city. Plato, who gives him a speech in the Symposium, seems to have counted him a friend despite his caricature of Socrates.