The Birds

Aristophanes’s The Birds explores the relationship between humanity and the gods of traditional Greek religion. With the birds as their intermediaries, the human characters of the play seek to redefine their status in relation to the gods, building Cloudcuckooland and soon forcing the gods to give up their power. The play subverts the traditional universal hierarchy of Greek religion while removing the gap between humans and their gods, thus challenging the supremacy of the divine Olympians.

The play begins with Peisetairos and Euelpides, Aristophanes’s human heroes, arriving in the land of the birds on a mission to escape the daily cares and tedium of the earthly realm. At this stage, Peisetairos and Euelpides seem motivated above all by a nostalgia for a happy bygone golden age, associated elsewhere in Greek literature with the period of Cronus, Zeus’s predecessor as ruler of the gods. However, these escapist motives rapidly change into something very different when Peisetairos proposes his plan for Cloudcuckooland: From the very beginning, Cloudcuckooland is conceived as a city that will enable a paradigm shift in the relationship between humans, birds, and the gods.

Peisetairos’s plans for Cloudcuckooland are founded on the idea that the birds would make better gods than the traditional gods, but also on the idea that the gap between humans, birds, and gods is not really all that insuperable: In the fantasy world of Aristophanes’s play, the gods starve if deprived of humanity’s sacrifices and are like humans in other ways as well.