‘Politics…are a stone attached to the neck of literature, which, in less than six months, drowns it. Politics in the middle of imaginative interests are like a pistol-shot in the middle of a concert. The noise is deafening without being emphatic. It is not in harmony with the sound of any of the instruments.’ Thus Stendhal. He spoke ironically; but critics of Aristophanes are dead serious when they make this same distinction between poetry and politics, and proceed to shut their ears to all those supposed pistol-shots that every Aristophanic concert contains. Acharnians, like the other ‘peace plays’, thwarts this muffling of the ears, because the whole play is deafening. Aristophanes has a clear ‘program’. The play is thoroughly political, beginning with its title, the name of the most hawkish demesmen of the day (Thuc. 2. 21. 3), and with the name of the dove, Dicaeopolis, ‘Just City’.

‘Just City’ makes peace with Sparta – an act of whimsy, of puckish self-assertion, not necessarily tendentious, one might like to think. All that matters is the brief imaginative and imaginary triumph of the old farmer. His very name, however, his justification of his action, and other matters, show that far more is at stake than the supposedly private and selfish claims of the protagonist.