That Pericles has been a privileged target of the political Athenian comedy in the second half of the fifth century BC is very well proved by the rich collection of historical and erudite evidences which more or less allude to how the citizens’ dissent was spread on the comic scene not only distinctly by Aristophanes but also by Callias, Cratinus, Hermippus, Plato Comicus, Teleclides and other well-known of archaia authors. The most important source of these comic evidences is the plutarchean Life of Pericles. Our purpose is then to reconstruct the portrait of the great Athenian statesman as it was shaped in such adverse tradition. From the comic repertoire available in the periclean Plutarch’s biography is unfortunately absent the Cratinus’ Dionysalexander, whose mention by the Chaeronean erudite would have allowed to much more precisely contextualise this significant evidence of the comic anti-periclean tradition.

The issue of the origin of the animal choruses disseminated in the comic Attic production of the fifth and sixth century has always attracted the interest of scholars for the variety of historical, iconographic, literary, performance-related, ritual, and even anthropological perspectives it opens on the theatrical phenomenon in the ancient world. This is also demonstrated by the publication, in a time span of about forty years, of two specific monographs on this topic, by Grigoris M. Sifakis and Kenneth Rothwell Jr., respectively, which – albeit with very different critical methods, approaches, and results – reassign to it a central position. Although this contribution takes into account the different theories elaborated on this theme since the last decades of the nineteenth century, it refrains from advancing solutions to a question destined to remain open, as well as from scrutinising the more significant peculiarities of the choruses from the surviving and fragmentary plays by Aristophanes and other comedians of archaia and mese. It focuses instead on a particular case, the parodos of Plutus, the last surviving comedy by Aristophanes, where a human chorus of old farmers temporarily regresses to a grotesquely wild animal state: a phenomenon which carries interesting implications for the metamorphic potentialities shown by an Attic comic chorus still in the age of transition from archaia to mese.

In the ‘eupolideans’ of Clouds II, evoking the beginning of his own artistic career, Aristophanes identifies himself with a παρθένος who, being unmarried, had to ‘expose’ her own ‘creature’ (the Banqueters staged by the poet in his first comedy in 427 b.C.), which was ‘picked up’ by another παῖς (the director Kallistratus) and ‘brought up’ by the public: the same public that – as the poet claims – inexplicably repudiated Clouds I, four years later. Within the same passage, Aristophanes represents this comedy (in the new version) as a new Elektra, who goes to her father’s grave hoping to find the hair lock that will reveal the presence of her brother Orestes. Due to its high metaphorical and allegorical value, this parabatic passage plays a very peculiar role in the canonical repertory of personifications of poetry, and particularly of comedy, that can be found in the surviving plays of Aristophanes as well as in the fragments of other authors of the archaia.

Starting from the theses expressed by Luciano Canfora in his recent volume on utopia in Aristophanes and Plato, this paper proposes a reflection on a metaphorical image – the politician sheperd of his people – that, already attested in homeric poetry, has been renewed by his peculiar purpose in a passage of Aristophanes’ Assemblywomen and in Plato’s first five Republic’s books, in conjunction with some crucial points of the development of the utopian concept of his Kallipolis.