Aristophanes

Aristophanes (c. 446 – c. 386 BCE) was an Athenian playwright of Old Comedy, the only complete comic plays to survive from classical Greece. His surviving works — including The Clouds, The Birds, Lysistrata, and The Frogs — combine political satire, mythological parody, and bawdy humor with experimental verbal invention, from invented compound words to choruses of croaking frogs and squabbling birds.

His plays skewered Athenian figures such as Socrates, Cleon, and Euripides, blending fantasy and reality through absurd premises — a sex strike to end war, a journey to heaven on a giant dung beetle — that established comedy as a vehicle for social and political critique.