The Old Persian line in Aristophanes ' « Acharnians » (100) is commonly believed to contain nothing but comic gibberish.
Against this view, it is argued here that a responsible reconstruction of an Old Persian original is possible if one takes into account what we nowadays know about late fifth-century Old Persian.
Moreover, the result, whose central element is the Persian verb for « writing », fits in with both general considerations on linguistic realism in drama and the historical reality of diplomatic interaction between Greece and Persia during the Peloponnesian War.
