There is a lively, sometimes acrimonious, debate current about how far modern methods of criticism should be applied to Classical texts created centuries, millennia even, before the theories were a twinkle in a critic's eye. This book offers a mediation between the positions for and against the use of modern methods, by arguing that the study of texts in terms of their own times is not an alternative to the use of modern methods, but a necessary prerequisite of it. In an attempt to recreate something of the ways in which the ancient Athenians may have received and reacted to the plays, which can then be used as the basis for contemporary readings, it applies the methods of structural anthropology to the study of the dramas. It is hoped that one advantage of this procedure will be that it offers the possibility of avoiding the uncritical reading back into the fifth century of contemporary attitudes to war and peace, city and country, wealth and poverty, sexuality and so on, and of grounding our interpretation of the texts in Athenian thought-patterns. The study is offered also as a means of opening up new questions in the study of Aristophanes: it does not claim in any way to be a full treatment of the author, nor that this is the only way to read him.