A socio-critical approach to the rural-urban dichotomy in Peace by Aristophanes

Abstract

In this article, we examine Aristophanes’ comedy Peace, written in the 5th century BC, in an attempt to explore the way in which the core-periphery polarization is presented as the axis around which the underlying social, cultural and economic tensions revolve. Against the background of the long and devastating Peloponnesian war, Aristophanes became keenly aware of the rural-urban dichotomy, heightened by the state of belligerence and its adverse consequences for the population. Peace is particularly revealing of the concomitant tensions and allows a glimpse of the author's position regarding both the war and the various forms of exchange between both spaces. Social criticism, the theoretical framework of the article, holds that all artistic creation is social practice and, therefore, ideological production. Drawing upon this tenet, we seek to cast light on the social values that organize the fictional text, without ignoring its aesthetic specificity. A socio-critical reading of the literary text makes it possible to relate writing and ideological production of meaning.