Poets in Hell:
Comic Criticism in Aristophanes' Frogs
Hardy Hansen

The frog graphics are from Sandra Loosemore's Froggy Page, a fine collection of frog images.

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The occasion of the Frogs

• last surviving example of Old Comedy
• 405 BCE, near the end of the Peloponnesian War and Athens' final defeat
• Euripides and Sophocles recently dead; Aeschylus dead half a century
• Pericles gone more than 20 years
• six years before the trial and execution of Sokrates

Cultural conflicts (in general)

• the Sophists' challenge to traditional beliefs
• the importance of rhetoric in the Assembly and the law courts
• Alkibiades: an amoral pupil of Sokrates

Cultural conflicts (in particular: "Old Tragedy" and "New Tragedy")

• Old Tragedy, exemplified by Aeschylus

  • trilogies on great, epical/epochal themes like the Trojan War
  • magniloquence (e.g., archaic words, compound coinages)
  • heroic rhythms
  • grand evocation of Zeus' moral order evolving over several generations
  • ancient example of Old Tragedy: Aeschylus' Agamemnon
  • more modern example of Old Tragedy: Shakespeare's Henry V

• New Tragedy, exemplified by Euripides
  • single plays, often showing mythical characters in their least "heroic" moments"
  • diction poetic but less elevated; rhetoric akin to that in the law courts, the Assembly, and Thucydides' history
  • lighter, less heroic rhythms, with successions of quick, short syllables
  • irony; moral dilemmas; psychological conflicts
  • ancient example of New Tragedy: Euripides' Hippolytus
  • more modern example of New Tragedy: T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land

Parody: "A literary or artistic work that imitates the characteristic style of an author or work for comic effect or ridicule" (American Heritage Dictionary)

• "Have YOU ever been parodized in a skit? I have!" (H. Hansen)
  • Public parody, with the victim (potentially) in the audience, suspends the usual taboo against talking about people when they're present. Even when well-intentioned, it gets to you!

• Everyone likes caricature.
  
  • A blow-up bust of Richard M. Nixon makes a great front-seat passenger.

    

  • Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky are still popular after several years.

• But is parody/caricature the same as condemnation/criticism?
  • Good parody has an "edge" or "bite"--but can we tell the politics of Jay Leno or David Letterman from their mockery?
  • The TV show "In Living Color" in the mid-nineties made fun of various types of people--was it racist?

• Conclusion: Read the parodies in the Frogs with caution. Don't take them too seriously--or too lightly. Remember two things:
  • The Athenians considered poets, both tragic and comic, to be teachers of the citizens.
  • Aristophanes was a comic poet.

Paratragedy--parody of tragedy--was a regular feature of Aristophanes' plays. So was the agon--a formal contest. The paratragic agon of the Frogs--the contest between Aeschylus and Euripides--is one of Aristophanes' best.

There are several rounds in which Aeschylus and Euripides mock each other.

• Round One
  • Euripides and Aeschylus exchange preliminary abuse.
  • The two contestants pray, A. to traditional deities, E. to newfangled gods like Aether and Nose.

• Round Two
  • E. mocks A.'s long portentous silences and puffed-up vocabulary.
  • E. says that he de-bloated tragedy and brought it down to earth with everyday characters.

  • A. gets E. to agree that the duty of a poet is "to tell the truth for the improvement of the city."
  • A. points to the patriotic spirit of his plays Seven Against Thebes and Persians.
  • A. says that E.'s plays, by contrast, have corrupted the citizens.

• Round Three: Prologues
  • E. attacks A.'s prologues for inaccuracy and redundancy.

  • A. attacks E.'s monotonous use of the same pattern of words by repeatedly inserting into his prologues the phrase "lost his little oil jar," which probably means something like "lost his erection" or "lost his balls."

  

• Round Four: Lyrics (i.e., emotive lines, sung rather than recited)
  • E. throws a nonsensical Homeric refrain into several of A.'s elevated lyric passages.
  • E. then barks out a repeated nonsense refrain ("tophlattothrat. . .") which probably imitates strumming on a guitar-like instrument.

  • A. brings out the Muse of Euripides: a clapped-out whore.
  • A. then recites a couple of Euripidean monodies full of excited, fluttering rhythms and ridiculously repeated words.

• Round Five: Weighty Words
  • A. and E. now weigh individual verses in a balance. A.'s are weightier (they have many images of death).

  • Dionysos cannot make up his mind, so Pluto suggests a final round, winner-take-all.

• Round Six: Advice for the City in a Time of Crisis
  • What to do about Alkibiades, a brilliant military commander but an amoral and unstable human being?
  • Both Aeschylus and Euripides seem to give serious advice.

• Dionysos' Final Decision
  • Dionysos chooses the one whom his heart desires--Aeschylus--even though he had originally come to Hades to fetch Euripides.

  • Dionysos dismisses Euripides by quoting a famous sophistical line from his Hippolytus (line 612): "My tongue swore [but my heart remained unsworn]."

How serious is all this?

• Compare two examples of modern paratragedy:
  • A. E. Housman's Fragment of a Greek Tragedy
  • Richard Curtis' The Skinhead Hamlet

• Consider a recent statement by Peter Nichols:
  • "[The argument of the Frogs] indicates the necessity of the city fighting for its life, and of a tragedy that inspires it to do so." (Aristophanes' Novel Forms: The Political Role of Drama, Atlanta/London/Sydney 1998, p. 194)

• Remember that Euripides' defeat does not necessarily relegate him to the ranks of third-rate poets. After all, in the opening scene at Herakles' house Dionysos, the god of tragedy and comedy, told his brother that he longed for Euripides because all the good poets had died.

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Bibliography

• Cartledge, Paul, Aristophanes and his Theater of the Absurd, London 1992
• Dover, K. J., Aristophanic Comedy, Berkeley/London 1972
• Konstan, David, Greek Comedy and Ideology, New York 1995
• MacDowell, D. M., Aristophanes and Athens: An Introduction to the Plays, Oxford/New York 1995
• Nichols, Peter, Aristophanes' Novel Forms: The Political Role of Drama, Atlanta/London/Sydney 1998
• Reckford, Kenneth J., Aristophanes' Old-and-New Comedy, Chapel Hill, NC 1987
• Whitman, Cedric H., Aristophanes and the Comic Hero, Cambridge, MA 1964

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