The Frogs

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Frogs opens with Dionysus cutting off his own slave's joke before it even lands. Xanthias is hauling his master's baggage and reaches for crude toilet humor about the heavy load, the kind of joke he assumes the audience wants. But the god pre-empts him out of frustration. Aristophanes staged this scene in 405 BC at the Lenaia, one of the Festivals of Dionysus in Athens. The play went on to win first place. Dionysus, the god of theatre, is heading to the underworld to bring back the tragedian Euripides, who has just died. He fears Athenian tragedy is declining while the city struggles through the Peloponnesian War. To make the trip, he disguises himself as his own half-brother Heracles. Heracles once kidnapped the guard dog Cerberus, and still carries a fearsome reputation in Hades for it. What happens when a cowardly god borrows a fearsome hero's identity? Once he reaches the palace of Pluto, he must judge a contest for the underworld's throne of tragedy. Which dead playwright, Euripides or the elder Aeschylus, deserves to return to the world of the living?

• 2. Borrowed Reputation

  ›

  Charon ferries Dionysus across the lake, though Xanthias, being a slave, has to walk the long way around instead of riding. Dionysus is put to work rowing the boat, while the chorus of frogs sings the parodos, the play's first choral interlude, croaking the refrain Brekekekèx-koàx-koáx. The sound so annoys Dionysus that he starts a mocking debate with the frogs, an argument he has no real hope of winning. At the shore, Xanthias teases the god by pretending to spot the monster Empusa, right before a second chorus of Dionysian Mystics appears. Hades' janitor mistakes the lion-skin-clad Dionysus for the real Heracles, and, still furious over the theft of Cerberus, threatens to loose several monsters on him. Frightened, Dionysus trades clothes with Xanthias, then trades back, then swaps a third time, each change triggered by someone venting anger at the supposed Heracles. A maid arrives thrilled to see 'Heracles' and invites him to a feast with virgin dancing girls; Xanthias is happy to go along with it. When the janitor returns to confront the man in the lion skin, Xanthias offers up his own 'slave', Dionysus, to be tortured for the truth. Both are whipped, and the terrified Dionysus finally admits he is a god, though the janitor still cannot tell which of them is lying. He hauls Dionysus offstage to be checked by Pluto and Persephone, while backstage, two of the household's slaves swap stories about the masters they serve.

• 3. The Weighing of Verses

  ›

  Sophocles, we learn, has stepped back from the contest entirely, deferring to Aeschylus out of respect. That leaves the newly dead Euripides challenging the elder Aeschylus for the seat of 'Best Tragic Poet' at Pluto's dinner table, with Dionysus as judge. Euripides argues his characters are better because they are more true to life and logical. Aeschylus counters that his idealized heroes are better because they are models of virtue. Aeschylus mocks Euripides by making him recite prologue after prologue, interrupting every one with the same phrase, 'lost his little flask of oil.' That routine is the source of the term lekythion, used ever since for this kind of predictable rhythmic pattern in verse. Euripides fires back by parodying Aeschylus' choral songs. He quotes passage after passage that all end in the identical refrain, borrowed from Aeschylus' lost play Myrmidons. The refrain runs, 'oh, what a stroke, won't you come to the rescue?' Aeschylus retorts by mocking Euripides' lyric meters and monodies, accompanied by castanets. To settle the argument, the two speak a line each into an actual set of scales, whichever has more 'weight' tipping the balance. Euripides offers verses naming the ship Argo, the goddess Persuasion, and a mace. Aeschylus answers with the river Spercheios, the figure of Death, and two crashed chariots, each with a dead driver still in it. The heavier images tip the scale toward Aeschylus, yet Dionysus still cannot decide. He finally admits his true purpose: to save Athens itself, and its theatre along with it, from the losing side of the Peloponnesian War. He asks each poet what should be done about the exiled Alcibiades, and how the city can be saved. Euripides answers cleverly but says nothing of substance, while Aeschylus gives practical advice, and Dionysus picks him to take home instead of Euripides. Pluto grants Aeschylus leave to return to the living so that Athens might be helped in its hour of need. He then invites everyone to a round of farewell drinks. Before departing, Aeschylus insists that his own chair should go to Sophocles while he is away, not to Euripides. Aeschylus's practical answers about Alcibiades and the war would soon face a real test. Athens' own fate was still undecided when the play was first staged.

• 4. A City at War

  ›

  Sparta and its allies had Athens under blockade while The Frogs was being written. Within six months of the play's production, Athens lost a battle at sea and surrendered to Sparta. Sophocles, one of the era's most celebrated tragedians, had also died shortly before the play reached the stage. The scholar Kenneth Dover reads the play's underlying political message as, in his words, 'old ways good, new ways bad.' He points to the parabasis, lines 718-737, which urges citizens to reject leaders he calls 'upstarts of foreign parentage.' It instead calls for returning to 'men of known integrity' raised in noble, wealthy families. The politician Kleophon is named in the parabasis' ode, lines 674-685, where he is 'vilified as a foreigner.' He is maligned again near the play's end, at lines 1504 and 1532. Aristophanes uses that same parabasis to plead for the return of exiled oligarchs, cast out during the reinstatement of Athenian democracy in 410. That appeal has been credited as one of the biggest reasons for the play's win at the Lenaea. In 405, the exiled were in fact granted the right to return and reclaim their citizenship, under conditions preserved in Andocides' speech 'On the Mysteries.' The Frogs breaks from the pattern of Aristophanes' earlier 'peace' plays, The Acharnians of 425 BC, Peace of 421 BC, and Lysistrata of 411 BC. Dover notes that Kleophon opposed any peace that did not come from outright victory. Yet Aeschylus' own advice, at lines 1463-65, lays out a plan to win the war rather than surrender. The parabasis also argues for restoring rights to those who took part in the oligarchic revolution of 411 BC. It claims they were misled by the 'tricks' of Phrynichus, the revolution's leader. Phrynichus was assassinated that same year, to general satisfaction. The proposal was simple enough to pass as a single act of the assembly. It was in fact enacted through Patrokleides' decree, after Athens lost its fleet at Aegospotami. An anonymous ancient Life credits this advice with winning Aristophanes an olive wreath. The author of the ancient Hypothesis adds that admiration for the parabasis was the main reason the play received a second production. The scholar J. T. Sheppard argues that the exiled general Alcibiades sits behind much of this. Athens' desperate position against the Peloponnesian League, he suggests, would have kept Alcibiades on every mind. Sheppard points to a passage from the parabasis, in the Murray translation from line 697. It pleads to 'grant for that one fault the pardon which they crave you on their knees.' The chorus reciting those lines plays initiates of the mysteries. Alcibiades' own exile had stemmed from an impiety charge tied to those same religious rites. Sheppard argues the passage would have reminded the audience of Alcibiades' actual return in 408 BC, when he made his peace with the goddesses. Aristophanes hints at this only subtly, Sheppard suggests, because Alcibiades still had rivals in Athens, including Kleophon and Adeimantus, both attacked in the play. Sheppard also points to Aeschylus quoting from his earlier work The Oresteia during the prologue debate as a further, quieter nod toward Alcibiades. Aristotle, writing later in the Politics, argued that man is by nature a political animal. Anyone without a state, by nature rather than accident, is what he calls 'tribeless, lawless, hearthless,' a natural lover of war. That same instinct for teaching a lesson through tragedy would soon carry over into how later critics judged the play itself.

• 5. Making the Canon

  ›

  W. Geoffrey Arnott reads The Frogs as a tool for teaching and advising its audience, its poets and playwrights cast as educators. The character Aeschylus claims that after he wrote Persians, he taught Athenian audiences to be resilient against their enemies. That theme of poets as advisors, Arnott argues, runs through the play's three central figures: Aeschylus, Euripides, and Dionysus himself. Aristotle makes a related claim in the Poetics: a playwright accused of writing something untrue can answer that it ought to be true instead. He credits Sophocles with saying he portrayed people 'as they ought to be,' and Euripides with portraying them 'as they are.' The chorus itself boasts, in lines 1110-1118, that the audience are 'seasoned veterans' who each carry a book. They understand 'the clever stuff,' the chorus says, sharper now than ever. That confidence reflects a city grown sophisticated in its reading habits, one where dramatic tradition could be picked apart onstage for the crowd's amusement. The written record of Euripides and Sophocles' work only grew more important once new plays from either stopped coming. A text, unlike a performance, could be read and staged again. The Frogs marks an early stage of that literary canon, presenting Euripides, Aeschylus, and Sophocles as some of the era's wittiest and most influential playwrights. This same play reflects Athens' shift toward a more literary culture, built increasingly around citizens who could read and write. That shift framed the 5th century BCE as a period of real scholarly advance. According to Kenneth Dover, the play's structure sets Dionysus a single goal for its first stretch: gaining admission to Pluto's palace, achieved by line 673. The parabasis follows, and in it two slaves reveal that Euripides is jealous of Aeschylus' standing as the greatest tragic poet. Pluto then asks Dionysus to judge their contest. Charles Paul Segal argues the play is structurally unusual because it fuses two comic patterns, a journey and a contest, giving each equal weight. Segal notes that Aristophanes flipped the usual order, downgrading the contest that normally came before the parabasis and expanding the parabasis into the agon. In earlier plays like The Acharnians and The Birds, the hero wins before the parabasis and spends the second half enacting his reforms. That reversal, Segal suggests, gives The Frogs an unusually serious tone. Centuries later, and continents away, audiences would still be borrowing this same croaking chorus for their own purposes.

• 6. Frogs Down the Centuries

  ›

  Gilbert and Sullivan's light opera The Pirates of Penzance has Major-General Stanley list his own scholarly credentials. He boasts that he 'knows the croaking chorus from The Frogs of Aristophanes.' Hope Mirrlees' 1920 work Paris: A Poem opens by quoting that same chorus: 'Brekekekek coax coax we are passing under the Seine.' The line also mimics the sound of a metro train. Finnegans Wake references this same play, with the line 'Brékkek Kékkek Kékkek Kékkek! Kóax Kóax Kóax! Ualu Ualu Ualu! Quaouauh!' At Yale, the frog chorus's call, followed by a few of Charon's lines, became part of the university's 'Long Cheer.' First used publicly in 1884, it was chanted at Yale sporting events until the 1960s. Lake Forest Academy's teams are still called the 'Caxys,' a name drawn from a similar cheer. Yale graduate Cole Porter echoed the same cheer in his song 'I, Jupiter,' from the musical Out of This World. In it, Jupiter sings 'I, Jupiter Rex, am positively teeming with sex.' The chorus answers back, 'Brek-ek-ko-ex-ko-ex-SEX!' Other schools built their own versions: Penn's cry ran 'Brackey Corax Corix, Roree.' Stanford's first Axe Yell, in 1899, used the chant 'Give 'em the axe, the axe, the axe!' during the beheading of a straw effigy. A later Axe Yell, rendering the refrain as 'croax croax,' was shared by both the University of California and Stanford. The writer Aldous Huxley, in his book Jesting Pilate, describes hearing a performance at a party in Bombay. A Mohammedan of Arab descent recited a poem about Sicily by the Panjabi poet Iqbal. Huxley described 'the shakes and warblings over a single long-drawn syllable' in the performance. He said it recalled the very feature of the Euripidean chorus that Aristophanes 'derides and parodies' in The Frogs. In 1974, Stephen Sondheim and Burt Shevelove adapted the play into a musical, replacing Euripides and Aeschylus with George Bernard Shaw and William Shakespeare. It premiered at Yale University's Olympic-size swimming pool, with an ensemble cast that included the then-students Meryl Streep, Sigourney Weaver, and Christopher Durang. The musical reached Broadway in 2004, with additional Sondheim songs and a book revised by Nathan Lane. The frogs that gave the play its name, and lent later generations their favorite chant, appear only once in the entire work. That single parodos beside the lake is the only time frogs are heard at all.