The Story Archive

The Acharnians

Aristophanes · 425 BCE · Play · Greek · Classical

Sick of six years of war and of an assembly that will not hear the word peace, an Attic farmer buys a private thirty-year truce for himself alone and declares his own doorway a free market open to every enemy state. Charcoal burners from Acharnae, whose vines the Spartans have burned, come to stone him, and he borrows rags and an argument from Euripides to plead his case with his head on a chopping block. The earliest surviving comedy in European drama, and the first of the plays in which the poet answers Cleon by name.

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