Aristophanes, a conservative yet revolutionary poet, had two main approaches to comedy: either the denial and ridicule of the people and things of his time, accompanied by an idealization of the past, or the escape, the flight into fantastic shapes of a 'better society.' Wise stances, since the comic writer is always, by nature, a prosecutor of the present and at the same time either a nostalgic for an idealized past or a visionary of a better future.

In the case of the 'Birds,' as well as in Wealth, Aristophanes has activated the second mechanism, the mechanism of allegorical, dreamlike utopia. Wouldn't a fairytale, after all, be entirely compatible with utopia? I thought that the 'Birds' could be narrated like a tale from a bourgeois grandmother to her grandchild. And a bourgeois grandmother must ensure, above all, her grandchild's dream, a dream from which they should not wake up too soon. And to prevent them from waking up, the footsteps of the narrative must be light, graceful, almost ethereal.

[Excerpt from the text on the back cover of the edition]