The Peloponnesian War and Aristophanes' personal battle with the pro-war populist, Cleon, are the two most important issues that underlie the play.
Athens at war
The Spartans were the dominant military power on the Greek mainland, and consequently Athenians were reluctant to venture on foot far from the safety of their own city walls. Most Athenians had lived in rural settlements up until then.[59] The Acharnians reflects this reluctant transition from rural to urban life. While sitting on the Pnyx, Dikaiopolis gazes longingly at the countryside and expresses his wish to return to his village.[60] Similarly, the old Acharnians sing lovingly of their farms,[61] they express hatred of the enemy for destroying their vines,[62] and they regard the Athenian agora as a place crowded with people that are best avoided.[63] Athens was the dominant maritime power in the Mediterranean however and its citizens could travel by sea with relative ease. Thus, the ambassadors who return from Persia and Thrace are resented by Dikaiopolis because he has been living roughly as a sentry on the battlements while they have been enjoying themselves abroad.[64] Privileged individuals such as Lamachas and Coesura are able to get out of Athens when times become difficult, and in this they are likened to slops that are emptied from an urban household.[65] Thus, the real enemies are not the Megarian and Boeotian farmers, with whom Dikaiopolis is happy to trade, nor even the Spartans, who were simply acting to protect their Megarian allies.[66] Instead, the real enemies are the "wicked little men of a counterfeit kind"[67] who have forced Dikaiopolis into an overcrowded urban existence.
The causes of the war are explained by Dikaiopolis in a manner that is partly comic and partly serious. His criticisms of Pericles and The Megarian Decree appear to be genuine, but he seems to be satirizing the historian Herodotus when he blames the war on the kidnapping of three prostitutes[68] (Herodotus cites the kidnappings of Io, Europa, Medea and Helen as the cause of hostilities between Greeks and Asiatics). The Acharnians in fact features two passages that allude to the work of Herodotus:[69] Dikaiopolis' account of the kidnapping of three women, and the Athenian ambassador's account of his travels in Persia.
Aristophanes versus Cleon
Aristophanes, or his producer Callistratus, was prosecuted by Cleon for slandering the polis with his previous play, The Babylonians. That play had been produced for the City Dionysia, a festival held early in spring when the seas were navigable and the city was crowded with foreigners. The audience of The Acharnians however is reminded that this particular play has been produced for the Lenaia, a winter festival which few foreigners attend.[70] The author moreover assures us that the real target of this play is not the polis but rather "wicked little men of a counterfeit kind". These scruples are enunciated by Dikaiopolis as if he were the author or producer. He subsequently presents the anti-war argument with his head on a chopping block, a humorous reference to the danger that the satirist puts himself in when he impugns the motives of influential men like Cleon.
