The author examines the eleven surviving comedies of Aristophanes as representative of ancient comedy, a literary genre that presents artistic and ideological homogeneity and expresses the spirit of Athenian society during a time of great developments, in the late 5th and early 4th centuries BC. It also provides information about the survival of Aristophanes' texts, the theater of his time, the style and structure of his works, as well as other ancient comic playwrights - predecessors, contemporaries, and successors.