The Birds

It goes without saying that avian or bird imagery would be an important motif in a play titled The Birds, yet the prominence of birds in Aristophanes’s play goes far beyond what is necessitated by the plot. Animal choruses were common in Old Comedy (compare Aristophanes’s Wasps and Frogs), but the birds of The Birds are on a different caliber altogether. The birds making up the Chorus—all 24 of them—are described in detail by Peisetairos and Euelpides as they flock onto the stage. Each of these birds of the chorus, moreover, represents a different species, and all but one correspond to real bird species (the “snipper” bird is a fiction). Ornithological humor continues to inform the rest of the play, such as in Aristophanes’s description of the birds’ building of the walls of Cloudcuckooland, a passage rich in avian imagery and puns.

Aristophanes’s The Birds is much concerned with society and the building blocks that constitute it, forming an important motif in the play. Cloudcuckooland is conceived as a city by the birds and for the birds—an idea straight from the realm of fantasy but nevertheless an idea founded on a human conception of society.