In the hilarious scene of the trial of the dogs (Wasps 826–1008), Aristophanes creates a free imaginative composition by putting together a variety of motifs and narrative patterns drawn from the tradition of animal tales and, in particular, Aesopic fables. The animals’ court of justice, the animated household utensils, the confrontation of dogs with contrasting qualities, and the theriomorphic representation of rival demagogues are well paralleled both in the ancient Aesopic corpus and in popular imagination. The old dicast Philocleon confesses that he delights above all in listening to Aesopic fables narrated by the litigants in court. Therefore, the private, household trial organised for Philocleon’s sake takes the form of a staged mega-fable with animal protagonists. Aristophanes, as usual, invests the fabulistic and fairy-tale materials with political symbolism and an ideological agenda. The litigation between the two personified dogs caricatures the struggle between statesmen of ancient Athens. Apart from the narrative motifs, Aristophanes also politicises the double-levelled codification of meaning that is inherent in the Aesopic fable. In the Aristophanic composition, the “moral” of the fable is not related to a common ethical vice or a situation of general experience, but to topical events of the poet’s contemporary Athens. Aristophanes conflates thetwo opposite trends that prevailed in earlier comic dramaturgy: the folktale and fantastic materials of Crates’ Märchenkomödie are woven together with the technique of political allegory developed by Cratinus.
