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He appears in Plato's Symposium, giving a humorous mythical account of the origin of Love. The Clouds, a disastrous production resulting in a humiliating and long-remembered (cf. the revised parabasis of "The Clouds" and the parabasis of the following year's "The Wasps") last place finish at the City Dionysia, satirizes the new, sophistic learning en vogue among the aristocracy at the time; Socrates was the principal target and in the play he emerges as a typical Sophist, no matter how inaccurate the portrayal may be. Lysistrata was written during the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta and presents a pacifist theme in a comical manner: the women of the two states show off their bodies and deprive their husbands of sex until they stop fighting. This play was later illustrated at length by Pablo Picasso.

A well-known saying 'can't live with them, can't live without them,' comes from one of Aristophanes' plays. Aristophanes's words in Lysistrata [411 B.C.], line 1038 (the original text as translated by Dudley Fitts was: "These impossible women! How they do get around us! / The poet was right: can't live with them, or without them!").