Abstract
In his comedies, Aristophanes attacks Hyperbolus some fifteen times; Plato the comic poet wrote an entire play on him. This evidence, together with the fact that the oligarchs deemed it necessary to have him killed in 411, shows that he was a statesman of some importance. He was banished from Athens through ostracism, plausibly in 417 BC; Aristophanes’ strong attack against him in the parabasis of the Clouds was written probably in 418 BC.
