Aristophanes Frogs

Heads-Up: Obscenity; Sex, Bathroom, Gender Humor

It's quite evident that the humor in this play is directed at a sexist male sensibility. It could well prove disquieting or offensive to modern readers. At the same time, this style of humor, in terms of the mindset to which it seems meant to appeal, potentially opens a window into ways of thinking partly shared with, partly foreign to, attitudes and assumptions prevalent in our here-and-now.

Aristophanes is also fond of (often bad) puns.

Journal Prompt: Debate

The most famous part of Frogs is the extended agōn, the trial scene, basically, the second half of the play, in which Dionysus has to choose which of the two playwrights, Aeschylus or Euripides (not Sophocles!?), has more to offer Athens in her hour of need in 405 BCE. Whoever of the two wins returns to the land of the living, specifically, to Athens, to rescue both tragedy and the city.

I'd like us to have a similar debate: Which of the two playwrights, Aeschylus or Euripides, has more to offer us in our hour of need.

For Frogs, please enter two (2) arguments into your journal:

One argument in favor of Aeschylus, and against Euripides, as the playwright you prefer, given the way things are now in our 21st-century (not Aristophanes') world. That could be in terms of entertainment value, how their plays (the ones we've read) do or don't speak to you — that sort of stuff (sort of wide open).
One argument in favor of Euripides, and against Aeschylus, as the playwright you prefer, given the way things are in our 21st-century (not Aristophanes') world. That could be in terms of entertainment value, how their plays (the ones we've read) do or don't speak to you — that sort of stuff (sort of wide open).

For each argument, find support in Aristophanes' text, in Aeschylus and Euripides, and in real life.

Text Access

Aristophanes. Frogs. Trans. Jeffrey Henderson. Newburyport, Mass.: Hackett/Focus Publishing, 2008. ISBN 978-1-58510-308-9. (Available via bookstore.)

Study Guide Proper

Basic Facts

Playwright. Aristophanes, Athenian, ca. 455-ca. 385 BCE.

Genre. Old Comedy (see below).

Festival. Lenaea (January Dionysian festival).

Time. The "now" of its production (405 BCE).

Setting. First, the street outside Heracles' door. Then the underworld, i.e., land of the dead.

Situation. Euripides and Sophocles have just died the previous year (406 BCE), Aeschylus has been gone since 456. Athens is without its greatest playwrights. At the same time, Athens is in danger of defeat and possible destruction at Spartan hands. (Remember, we're at the tail end of the Peloponnesian War, 431-404 BCE.) Dionysus, god of theater, is concerned; indeed, he has a yearning for Euripides as big as Heracles' for minestrone soup. So, disguised as Heracles Dionysus along with his slave, Xanthias ("Blondie"), head on down to the underworld to retrieve Euripides to put things right. (They've stopped off at the house of Heracles — he's a veteran Hades visitor — to pick up some gear from the hero and some tips.) But when Xanthias and Dionysus arrive, they find that the poet of the Bacchae has seized the Throne of Tragedy away from its previous holder, Aeschylus. So a contest ensues: Whose tragedies are better? Who has more to offer Athens? Who'll go back with Dionysus to the world above?

Characters.

Chorus of Frogs
Chorus of Initiates (Demeter and Dionysus worshipers)
The god Dionysus (in this play known also as Iacchus)
His slave Xanthias ("Blondie")
The hero Heracles
Pluto (king of the dead)
Charon (ferryman who transports the dead to Hades)
Aeacus (doorman of the dead)
Aeschylus
Euripides
Assorted other speaking and non-speaking parts (see text)

Alcibiades. Alcibiades isn't a character in the play, but he figures prominently in the final section of the debate. For the win, Dionysus in Frogs asks Euripides and Aeschylus to express what each thinks about this highly controversial and divisive figure, and whether Athens should once again go to him to seek his help. Alcibiades, aristocrat, orator, and military strategist, was also violent, selfish, and unreliable. The Athenian people alternated between, on the one hand, being smitten with his personal beauty and charismatic leadership, on the other hand, heaping blame upon him, and not without cause, for all manner of woe that befell the city. He betrayed Athens more than once, and he betrayed those he betrayed Athens to. At this stage in the game, with the war with Sparta going terribly for the Athenians, recalling Alcibiades from exile would have appeared a last-ditch effort to wrest victory from the jaws of defeat.

Genre: Old Comedy

We call the genre Old Comedy; that's to distinguish it (naturally!) from Middle and New Comedy. Greek comedy (kōmōidia, "kōmos song"), like tragedy and satyr drama, has its origins in impersonation and role-play associated with Dionysian cult and revelry. Old Greek Comedy is generally dated from the year 486 (the year that comedy was first entered into competition at the Greater Dionysia) till about 400 BCE. It was a purely Athenian genre.

The Old Comic playwright whose plays we know best is Aristophanes, and I'll talk about his plays here.

Like contemporary tragedy and satyr drama, Old Comedy features a chorus and solo actors. The Old-Comic chorus plays a key role: big, splashy production numbers feqautring song, dance, fancy costumes, and so on. Absurd personifications and anthropomorphisms abound in Old Comedy: choruses of wasps (Wasps), of clouds (Clouds), of birds (Birds), of towns (Eupolis' Towns) — you get the idea. Also, Old Comedy didn't hold itself to the same three-actor limit that tragedy and satyr drama did: big casts.

Aristophanes' comedies feature a number of elements also found in tragedy: a prologue to set the story up, a choral entry song, actor-actor dialogue, imitation of tragic style and song (paratragedy), etc. But the resemblances to tragedy more or less end there. One element distinctive to Old Comedy is the parabasis, a complex choral number where the chorus is the star. Aristophanes in his parabases (plural of parabasis) often lands barbed comments on fellow Athenians: politicians, fellow playwrights, anyone. In the parabasis of Frogs, Aristophanes delivers political advice. Aristophanes' parabases also see the chorus openly demand that the judges award their playwright the prize, often with tongue-in-cheek bribes. For Aristophanes, the comic chorus is a bully pulpit.

The plots of Aristophanes' comedies are often quite complex and somewhat chaotic. One plot line can get side-tracked into another. In Frogs, Dionysus starts out wanting to rescue Euripides from Hades, but ends up judging a contesxt between Euripides and Aeschylus.

Always, the situations in Aristophanes resonate with contemporary Athenian life, often with real-life characters. Except that comedy will take that situation, say, Athens lack of good tragic poets, and introduce absurd, sometimes supernatural elements, for instance, if we lack good poets in the land of the living, lets go get one from the land of the dead. In its absurd and unreal moments, Arsitophanic comedy can get very mythological.

As usual for Aristophanes, there is lots of indecent horsing around, lots of verbal abuse of living persons, lots of satire. But do all the poop, fart, sex, and hitting jokes mean that Frogs can't also possess serious content? You'll notice I'm trying get you to consider at the least the possibility that it might. Even the extremely silly frog chorus ("Brekekekex koax koax") has something serious to say. If you consider the whole in relation to what's at stake (politically, militarily, artistically), peremptory dismissal of the play's seriousness becomes less of an option.