This paper outlines Aristophanes’ place in Greek school education from Late Antiquity to date, tracing the pedagogical and ideological criteria for his inclusion or exclusion from the syllabus. Despite his academic canonisation already since the Hellenistic era, he only replaced Menander in the school canon after the 4th century aD, with the advantage of his ‘Attic purity’. The emergence of the Byzantine triad within the next six centuries suggests that teachers now appreciated not only language or moral messages, but also the suitability of the specific plays for rhetorical training. Even during the Ottoman occupation, Aristophanes was part of the syllabus for those few who could proceed beyond the rudiments of reading and writing. Consequently, his marginalisation in, and eventual exclusion from the mod-ern Greek curricula seems ironical. It is explained, however, by the Romantic Nationalist agenda which education came to serve in the 19th century, as well as the puritan morality and political polarisation which marked the 20th century. In the dawn of our century, the belated introduction of Aristophanes as a school subject was undermined by the administration’s desultory regulations; the much-promising and progressive curricula were doomed to fail in the deeply rooted conservatism —pedagogical and political— of modern Greek education.
