The Frogs by Aristophanes

1/ Could anyone love ancient Greek drama and not love The Frogs? 

The premise is this: Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles are all dead; the Athenian stage is now devoid of talent (“I defy you to find a genuine poet among the whole lot of them: one who can coin a memorable line,” Dionysus says to Heracles); so the god of drama, Dionysus, decides to go to the underworld to bring back one of the dramatists. 

The first half of the play is the journey of Dionysus, in disguise as Heracles, to Hades. The second half is the battle between the traditional Aeschylus and the innovative Euripides. 

When Aristophanes wrote the play, Aeschylus had been dead for some time (456 or 455 BC), Euripides had recently died (ca 406 BC), but Sophocles was still alive; Sophocles died before the play was performed in 405 BC but Aristophanes didn’t have enough time to rewrite the whole play and incorporate him into it, so he only rewrote some lines to allude to Sophocles’s departure to the underworld. 

If you’re familiar with ancient Greek drama, The Frogs is invaluable because it offers insights into contemporary reception of these dramatists—the three tragedians who survive are indeed the three greatest—it’s also fascinating as one of the earliest pieces of literary criticism, long before Aristotle’s Poetics. As its own thing, it’s also a very funny play. Some of the jokes are over my head, naturally—there are local references, some of the plays mentioned don’t survive, and above all, I cannot read ancient Greek and missed all the jokes about metre and language—but I have read enough to see the contrast between Aeschylus and Euripides and it’s still a very funny play. 

Like Shakespeare, Aristophanes mixes the high and the low, the serious and the ridiculous. 

I read the translation by David Barrett, revised by Shomit Dutta. 

2/ Dionysus goes to Hades with his slave Xanthias. 

“CHARON I don’t take slaves. Not unless they fought in the sea-battle.

XANTHIAS I was exempted on medical grounds: eye trouble.” 

The relationship between the two is hilarious. 

“DIONYSUS I feel faint. Give me a sponge.

[XANTHIAS extracts a sponge from one of the bags.]

Press it on my heart, there’s a good chap.

XANTHIAS There you go.

DIONYSUS No, here. That’s it.

XANTHIAS The heart’s slipped a bit, hasn’t it?

DIONYSUS What? Oh, yes – the sudden shock. It’s taken refuge in my… lower intestine.” 

The introduction by Shomit Dutta also makes me think about the question of actors. As the playwrights were allowed first 2 actors, then increased to 3 by Sophocles, and the chorus, the actors had to do quite a lot of doubling. In The Frogs, the main actor would play Dionysus, who I think was onstage the entire time; the second actor would play Xanthias and Euripides or Aeschylus. 

3/ Why is the play called The Frogs? I have no idea. But there’s a chorus of frogs when Dionysus is on the way to see the dead playwrights. 

“FROGS

Brekekekex, koax, koax,

Brekekekex, koax, koax!

Oh we are the musical Frogs!

We live in the marshes and bogs!

Sweet, sweet is the hymn

We sing as we swim,

And our voices are known

For their beautiful tone…”

4/ Even though Aristophanes’s Aeschylus and Euripides are probably not much like the actual Aeschylus and Euripides, the same way Aristophanes’s Socrates is not much like the real Socrates, the duel between the two characters is amusing. 

“EURIPIDES But is a cock suitable material for a tragedy?

AESCHYLUS And you, you blasphemer, what did you put into your plays?”

Euripides is, as always, accused of bringing all sorts of characters into his plays. 

“AESCHYLUS […] No one can say I ever put a lustful woman into a play.

EURIPIDES How could you? You’ve never even met one.

AESCHYLUS And thank heaven for that…” 

5/ The Penguin edition of Alcestis and Other Plays (translated by John Davie) has an excellent introduction by Richard Rutherford, in which he compares the three Greek tragedians. 

“Whereas Aeschylus’ characters (the Prometheus apart) are above all members of a family or of a larger community, Sophocles tends to focus on individuals set apart from their society or at odds with those who care for them: Ajax, Antigone, Electra, Philoctetes, the aged Oedipus. With him, more than with the other two tragedians, it makes sense to speak of tragic heroes and heroines. […] The role of the chorus is somewhat reduced, though some of the odes which reflect on human achievement and its smallness in relation to the timeless power of the gods have a poetic splendour to match almost anything in Aeschylus. The characters have more depth and subtlety…” 

That is probably why Sophocles is my favourite, even though I love all three. They’re all different: Aeschylus is monumental, full of grandeur, but he’s more distant; Sophocles and Euripides focus more on individual characters, though Sophocles has a tragic hero or heroine at the centre for the entire play whereas Euripides tends to shift the focus from one character in half of the play to another in the latter half. 

“The plays of Euripides, although they still work within the traditional range of myths, do not generally dramatize heroic initiatives and triumphant achievements. His are tragedies of suffering rather than action (the Medea again is a special case, a partial exception).” 

Rutherford makes an important point though: 

“In some ways Euripides can be seen as a more self-consciously literary dramatist than his fellow tragedians. […] He seems regularly to modify the conventions of his genre and adapt the work of his predecessors, sometimes even drawing attention to the changes he has made. […] Aeschylus and Sophocles are also experienced in reshaping and adapting traditional motifs, but Euripides goes far beyond them in playing with conventions and exploiting the spectator’s awareness of the dramatic situation. While shocked and moved by the events on stage, we are nevertheless frequently reminded that this is ‘only’ a play.” 

I would probably have to think more about the last sentence, but that passage has a good point. If I have to choose between Euripides and Aeschylus, I would probably go for Euripides for the variety and inventiveness and the various interesting things he does in his plays, though the Oresteia is magnificent.

To go back to Aristophanes—after all this blog post is meant to be about him and The Frogs (which, by the way, Richard Rutherford does mention in his introduction)—he is also a great dramatist and very inventive. The five plays I’ve read so far are all different: Lysistrata is a farce about a sex strike; Women at Thesmophoria Festival includes Euripides as a character and parodies multiple of his plays; The Clouds is the most intellectual of the plays, satirising the Sophists; The Birds is a fantasy, about the utopia of Cloudcuckooland; and now The Frogs is something different altogether. 

It is fascinating that these great dramatists were alive and working in the same place around the same time.