About the work
The Acharnians was performed at the Lenaia in 425 BC, won first prize, and is the oldest completely surviving comedy in world literature. It was Aristophanes' third play, submitted, like his earlier works, through his associate Callistratus, and it doubled as a response to the politician Cleon, who had prosecuted him over the previous year's Babylonians.
Plot
The Athenian farmer Dikaiopolis, weary of six years of the Peloponnesian War, strikes a private thirty-year peace with Sparta on his own initiative. The charcoal-burners of Acharnae want to lynch him for it, but a speech borrowed from Euripides wins them over. While Dikaiopolis enjoys his peace through markets and feasting, the bellicose general Lamachus returns wounded from the front.
Cultural significance
As the earliest of the three 'peace comedies', alongside Peace and Lysistrata, the play already shows Aristophanes' recurring pattern: a single citizen solves, through an absurd idea, a problem politics cannot fix. It remains the most vivid surviving testimony to war-weariness in 420s Athens.