Aristophanes and the events of 411

The dates of performance of Aristophanes' Lysistrata and Thesmophoriazusae are still not generally agreed. The most widely accepted opinion is perhaps that of Wilamowitz, that Lysistrata was produced at the Lenaia and Thesmophoriazusae at the City Dionysia in the same year, 411 B.C. But both Schmid and Gelzer, in their authoritative works on Aristophanes, have given reasons for reversing these assignments and putting Th. first; Russo holds that both plays were produced on the same occasion; and Rhodes has recently revived the view—which goes back to Dobree and beyond—that Th. is to be dated to 410, during the régime of the Five Thousand.The one unequivocal and undisputed datum we have comes from Hypothesis I to Lys., which tells us that that play was produced in the archonship of Kallias (412/1). Further information can be elicited from a variety of sources:(1) statements by scholiasts giving the date, relative to one of the plays, of an event whose date is independently known;(2) references (or, less safely, failures to refer) in the plays themselves to datable events;(3) references to the season of the year at which the performance took place;(4) considerations of the type of play more likely to have been produced at one or the other festival;(5) references in one play to the other;(6) the political, military and diplomatic conditions, movements, prospects and attitudes reflected in the plays, considered with reference to contemporary events.