Tragedy—the word conjures up a multitude of associations, some clichéd. By calling something a tragedy, whether a literary work or an event in a person's or a society's experience, one may suggest suffering and trauma but also grandeur and endurance and nobility. A tragedy is something horrible and yet, paradoxically, edifying. For those who are morally inclined, it demonstrates the punishment that befalls the proud or the flawed; for those more fatalistic, it suggests humanity's unmerited but inevitable suffering in an indifferent universe. To some people, certainly, tragedy as a literary genre is old and boring, loved by the Greeks but of little relevance now.

Aristophanes’ second play, Babylonians, included an attack on state offices and politicians and, probably, the city's treatment of its allies. According to the scholia of Acharnians, the play provoked Cleon to indict Aristophanes (or the play's producer Callistratus) for άδικία and ύβρις towards the δῆμος and the βοuλη on the grounds that he treasonably embarrassed the city before strangers at the City Dionysia. Cleon may also have questioned Aristophanes’ citizenship, suggesting that the poet (or Callistratus) was really a native Aiginetan, not a true Athenian. Aristophanes returned fire at the Lenaia of 425 with Acharnians, a play that renews Babylonians’ attack on Athens’ misguided politics and politicians. Even more important, by making a separate peace with Sparta and by offering in his speech of self-defense before the chorus to defend the enemy, the comic hero Dikaiopolis commits ‘crimes’ equivalent to those for which Aristophanes was indicted.