The Frogs

Frogs is both a play and a self-contained work of literary criticism that explores what roles poets and theater should play in the public life of democratic Athens. From the outset, the play affirms the importance of poets to Athens’ survival. Its plot revolves around Dionysos descending into Hades to recover recently deceased tragic poet Euripides in order to save Athens. Beyond the boundaries of this particular play lie the context in which theater is performed during sacred festivals to honor the gods and invite their benevolent protection and in the context of poetic competitions among comic and tragic poets. Thus, theater generally and the playwrights within Frogs honor the gods while elevating their own art as a sacred calling.

The debate between Aischylos and Euripides foregrounds competing values for tragic poets. Aischylos comes down on the side of tradition, grandiloquent language, and martial values while Euripides favors simple but transcendent language that provokes spectators to question the status quo. When Dionysos struggles to decide which of these will most benefit the city, he asks both poets to share their views of Alkibiades, a younger contemporary of Euripides but unknown from personal experience to Aischylos.

Both poets provide cryptic answers that dance around the topic. Euripides pronounces that he hates a man who is “[r]eluctant to help his homeland but quick to harm it” and “who advances himself but hinders the city” (230). Whether this is taken as pro- or anti-Alkibiades depends on how one interprets his actions. Aischylos warns the city not to “rear a lion inside the city,” and if they do, “be sure to tend to its needs” (230). Whether this means the Athenians should “tend to [Alkibiades’] needs” is not specified. The poets’ responses to Dionysos’ request for one suggestion to save the city are equally open-ended. Euripides suggests changing tactics if the ones currently being used are not benefiting the city, while Aischylos seems to reiterate a military policy that was suggested by Perikles, Athens’ leader at the start of the Peloponnesian war.

That Dionysos seems to select Aischylos at random and without justification for his decision are telling. The only decisive victory is that Aischylos’ words weigh more, but even this clarity is undermined by the pun on literal weight. One of Aischylos’ quotes refers to the river Spercheios while Euripides’ evokes wings and flight. Explaining to Euripides why Aischylos won, Dionysos explains, “he put in a whole river: just like wool-sellers / He made his verse weigh more by making it moist, / While you put in a verse that was winged and light” (229). Dionysos’ explanation could effectively suggest that Aischylos cheated, whether intentionally or not. The randomness of Aischylos’ victory may be as much a commentary on tragedy as on the specific poets. Perhaps Aristophanes recognizes that it is too late for Athens to be saved, and the city’s best consolation now is not tragedy but a comedy that temporarily transports them to a fantastical world where the impossible becomes real.