Peace and Two Other Plays: Knights and Wasps - Aristophanes and Menander

In this volume, we can almost hear the satirist's sigh of frustration, if not his screams of outrage, at the mental and moral state of his city and its love for and obsequy to the war profiteer and crass demagogue, Cleon, a man whose populist rhetoric kept the brutal and bloody war going.

This he does in all of the three plays included here. And along with his screams of frustration we can also see his finger, violently shaking at the institution which was supposed to protect his fellow citizens from the likes of Cleon and his evil retinue but which does, in fact, quite the opposite. The tangled weave of the Athenian law courts was so besotted by his blustering loudmouth that it became his power base and protected him unreservedly.

His Peace is the so-called "Peace of Nikias" which was supposed to be a peace that promised to last fifty years but, in fact lasted less than one. Not that it was a time of peace either but rather an ongoing throwing of spears at each other's allies, a goading by proxy. Peace? He asks, "We'll get that when the prickly backs of porcupines are made smooth!" In other words, never!