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What is common in Aristophanes’ Assemblywomen and Book V of Plato’s Republic is the communal life described as the abolition of private property and of marriage. It is important to see, however, that there are fundamental differences in content between their utopian thoughts. For example, their goals and hierarchical order are significantly different in the application and their presentations of utopian thoughts were distinct in critical or positive ways. Aristophanes attempted to show that human beings are imperfect, while Plato considered that utopia can be pursued for the sake of itself. In particular, Plato tried to show that the property should be shared in common in order to maintain the internal unity of the whole system. On the other hand, Aristophanes seemed to focus on the depiction of the ideal life. In this respect, Aristophanes’ comedy can be seen as a kind of utopian thought to represent the “best” whose underlying aim is to reveal the critical function against community. On the contrary, Plato aimed at searching for the “best person” whose mission is to attain the inner unity of the ideal city by a construction of the ideal hierarchy among different functions of the community. In this sense, Plato’s ambitious project has its positive aspect. The basic idea of ideal city represented in co-ownership of property and ideal constitution was already prevalent in the Greek society even before Aristophanes and Plato. The ideal was a reflection of the Greek Golden Age in which the ideal life had been reverberated through their mysterious thinking and imagination. In short, pleasurable lives had been motivated by fairy-tale motifs. It would be reasonable to infer from this study that Aristophanes’ utopian thoughts had been heavily influenced by Hippodamus’ political ideal and reform thoughts. It has been widely accepted that Hippodamus’ thoughts have to do with Pythagorean thoughts and the mysterious folklores orally transmitted by the traditional Greek world. In this sense, it would be wrong to say that Plato’s thought stimulated Aristophanes’ one. It would be rather reasonable to argue that Plato’s thought had been also influenced by these utopian thoughts. Plato’s political community based on dialectics can be seen as an extension of these thoughts.
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Aristophanes, Platon, Ecclesiazusai, Politeia, Utopia
