The reader may reasonably enquire, ‘Why (yet) another book on Old Comedy?’ I sympathise. We have for some time been pretty well equipped with texts and commentaries and scholars have recently raced to pack the bookshelves with volumes devoted to the interpretation of Aristophanes, of Eupolis and of the genre as a whole. Yet I have felt obliged to add to this stockpile because I think that still we have not reached any real understanding of several crucial matters which relate to the context and impact of satirical comedy in the fifth century, and that I have discovered a new way to resolve them. In the welter of severe ignorance which pervades the study even of Aristophanes, to say nothing of his fragmentary rivals, this may seem like a bold claim. Nonetheless, since what I have to say arises in the first instance from an authorial address (the revised parabasis of Clouds) and then from external evidence, I feel that it is worth proceeding, even if the journey ahead is parlous and fraught with lacunae.

I begin by challenging the general assumption (for which see among others Ste Croix, Sommerstein, Henderson and Edwards) that insofar as we can know where Aristophanes stood politically, it was on the ‘right’ of Athenian politics. A new interpretation of the context envisaged for the Clouds revision, together with a reexamination of some external evidence, points in a very different direction, towards an Aristophanes whose ideological anchor is at the radical end of the democratic spectrum.