Aristophanes

Aristophanes was born in Athens about 446 BC. He is the greatest writer of Greek Old Comedy and the only one whose plays survive whole: eleven of more than forty. Through the years of the Peloponnesian War he mocked politicians, generals, philosophers and poets, Socrates and Euripides among them, with unbridled fantasy, coarse jokes and lyric choruses of great beauty, and pleaded tirelessly for peace. Plato gave him, in the Symposium, a famous speech on the origin of love.