Plutus

Plutus (Greek: Πλοῦτος) is a late work of Aristophanes (c. 446–c. 385 BCE), the father of ancient Greek comedy, and the last of his eleven surviving comedies. Its protagonist is an ordinary farmer, Chremylus, who observes that honest people grow ever poorer while the unjust grow ever richer. He goes to the temple of Apollo to ask what kind of life his son should choose. The oracle tells him to follow the first person he meets after leaving the temple, and he brings home a blind beggar who crosses his path—only to discover that the beggar is Plutus, the god of wealth himself. Plutus was blinded by Zeus, who was jealous of humanity and would not let good people prosper. Chremylus sets out to restore his sight so that wealth will flow only to the righteous, which leads to a fierce debate with Penia, the goddess of poverty: is poverty (deprivation) a curse, or the very force that drives human labor, the development of skills, and the pursuit of virtue? Once Plutus regains his sight, good people grow rich one after another, and humanity ceases to worship the gods—leaving the gods themselves starving and forced to send envoys to beg for help. The play asks, in comic form, whether wealth and justice can coexist—touching on the core question of Plato's Republic and serving as an important text for understanding ancient Greek political ethics. This edition is the first standalone volume of the Complete Works of Aristophanes edited by Liu Xiaofeng, translated from the Greek by Huang Weiwei. The translator divides the ten scenes with section headings that outline the structure, making it easy to read and to imagine in performance.