42 pages • 1 hour read
AristophanesThe Birds
Fiction | Play | Adult | BCEA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Lines 1-800Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Lines 1-309 Summary
The play begins some unspecified distance from Athens, in a desolate area or in the wilderness. Peisetairos and Euelpides enter with Peisetairos’s slaves, Manes and Xanthias, who are carrying their baggage. Both are carrying birds on their wrists: Peisetairos has a crow on his wrist, Euelpides a jackdaw.
Peisetairos and Euelpides fear that they are lost and that the man who sold them the crow and jackdaw swindled them when he promised the birds would lead them to Tereus, the mythical king who was transformed into a Hoopoe and who now rules over the birds. Euelpides, addressing the audience, explains that he and Peisetairos are fed up with the fines, lawsuits, and general drudgery of urban life in Athens and are hoping that the Hoopoe (Tereus) has discovered a place where they can lead carefree lives “while flying around” (48).
Peisetairos and Euelpides are guided to a cliff by their birds. Climbing up, they come across the Hoopoe’s kitchen inside a rock. The Hoopoe’s Servant—a talking bird—emerges from the rock, and after a brief exchange, Peisetairos and Euelpides ask him to fetch his master. The Hoopoe enters, a parody of the mythical figure from Sophocles’s tragedy Tereus.
Peisetairos and Euelpides introduce themselves and ask the Hoopoe whether, in flying all over the world, he has ever found a “city that’s warm and woolly— / A place to curl up in, like a big soft blanket” (121-22). Dismissing the Hoopoe’s initial suggestions, Peisetairos proposes that the birds found a city of their own. If the birds build a great wall over their domain, they would command a great deal of power, for any exchanges between human beings and gods (such as sacrifices) would need to go through the city of the birds.
The Hoopoe is excited about Peisetairos’s idea but tells him he must first put his proposal to the birds for a vote. The Hoopoe awakens his wife, the Nightingale, and then summons the other birds with a song. The birds—which form the Chorus—answer the Hoopoe’s call and file on stage as Peisetairos and Euelpides identify their different species (there are 24 in total).
Lines 310-800 Summary
The Chorus demands to know why they have been summoned. They are initially horrified to discover that two human beings have been admitted to their midst and call for the death of Peisetairos and Euelpides. At the Hoopoe’s pleading, though, the Chorus finally agrees to hear the strangers out.
Peisetairos details his plan for a bird city, claiming that the birds used to be the rulers of the cosmos, having existed before the gods and even the earth. Though the birds have lost their former power, they can regain it by building a fortified bird city. Such a city would allow the birds to control all traffic between the gods and humanity so that the gods themselves would soon be forced to hand their authority over to the birds.
The birds eagerly approve Peisetairos’s plan. The Hoopoe calls on the birds to get to work on their new city, giving Peisetairos and Euelpides a root to consume that will cause them to sprout wings and introducing them to his wife, the Nightingale. The Nightingale was formerly the mythical Procne, a princess of Athens.
The Chorus sings the Parabasis, addressing the audience as they describe their primordial origins and power. They claim to be children of Eros, the divine personification of love or lust, which would make them older than the gods. They boast of their importance in matters of love, navigation, and divination and promise to make better rulers than the traditional gods.
Lines 1-800 Analysis
Aristophanes’s The Birds, like Aristophanes’s other surviving comedies, unfolds in a contemporary world. Unlike Aristophanes’s other comedies, however, the action is set not in Athens (Aristophanes’s home city) but in a geographically ambiguous fantasy world, the territory of the birds. The first part of the play introduces the characters of the play, their motivations, and the central themes of utopian fantasy and the relationship between the birds, humanity, and the gods.
The prologue of The Birds—in the conventions of Attic drama, the scene preceding the entrance of the Chorus—introduces the Athenians Peisetairos and Euelpides, who are hoping to find a land where they can live in ease and comfort. Peisetairos and Euelpides emphasize that they want to escape the general toil and drudgery of human society. Among other things, they are fed up with the routine of litigation, debts, and so on. They insist that they are not seeking a city that is greater than Athens and that they have no desire to live like aristocrats—all they want is a city that is “more comfortable for [them]” (124).
However, Peisetairos almost immediately seizes upon the “potential for power” (163) to be found among the birds, and his proposal for an avian city—the city of Cloudcuckooland—soon becomes almost a fantasy replica of Athens and the Athenian Empire. In claiming that the birds could mediate between humans and gods, and then ultimately seize divine power for themselves, Peisetairos introduces the theme of Challenging the Supremacy of the Gods. Peisetairos and Euelpides’s modest initial claims of wanting nothing more than “a place to curl up in” (122) have been transformed into a grandiose vision of Cloudcuckooland as a powerful alternative to Olympus and the authority of the gods themselves.
The Parodos (the entrance of the Chorus) and the subsequent Agon (debate scene) between the two human characters and the bird Chorus set up The Relationship Between Humanity and Animals, one of the principal themes of the play. The Agon begins when the birds react with horror to find two humans in their territory and immediately attack them. The birds are understandably fearful of human beings, who have often captured and hunted birds in the past: The Chorus declares that humans have “been the enemies of birds / Throughout their whole existence” (335) and that “[their] enmity with humankind is generations old” (374). The human characters, for their part, urge the birds to change their ways, describing their characteristic actions—flying around, gaping, chirping—as silly or “undignified” (166). Indeed, Peisetairos’s proposal is that the birds should learn from their human enemies and build a city of their own, a city that will dominate humanity and even the gods.
With the foundation of Cloudcuckooland, a kind of hybrid, human-avian society is created. The dichotomy between bird and human is obscured, with Peisetairos and Euelpides even acquiring wings that enable them to fly just like the birds. However, there are also elements of human society that existed among the birds even prior to the arrival of Peisetairos and Euelpides: The Hoopoe (who was originally Tereus, a human king of Greek mythology) keeps a traditional Greek household, complete with a wife (the Nightingale) and even a Servant. The birds are able to talk and communicate with the humans, having been taught by the Hoopoe. Furthermore, some of the species of birds who make up the Chorus have names that recall human races, ethnicities, or professions, such as the “Mede” bird or the “snipper” bird. In blurring these boundaries between human and animal, the play suggests that The Relationship Between Humanity and Animals may not be as clear-cut as it first appears.
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By Aristophanes
