The Frogs

Three challenges for modern readers of ancient Greek comedies include the visual and poetic effects that are lost when reading words on a page and understanding the many allusions to figures, events, and institutions that would have been familiar to ancient Greek audiences.

In the genre of Old Comedy, plays incorporated three forms of language: speech, chant with musical accompaniment, and lyrics with musical accompaniment. However, visuals were of paramount importance to productions. The Chorus danced their songs, providing a visual complement to their words. Male actors played all roles, including female characters, wearing papier-mache or cork masks that fully covered their heads. Masks could be generic male or female portraits or portraits that portrayed prominent citizens with distinct physical characteristics, animals, or gods. Male characters dressed in contemporary Greek clothing on which a leather phallus (flaccid or erect as relevant to the content) was sewn. Some male characters also had large stomachs and backsides sewn onto their costumes. Men playing female roles wore body stockings onto which female body parts were sewn.

Old Comedies were staged at sacred festivals in honor of Dionysos and were composed for audiences who would have been intimately familiar with pressing issues of the day. Playwrights satirized and parodied important debates and people of contemporary Athens, blending what modern readers would call fantasy (gods and myths) with contemporary issues (war, politics, social and religious rituals). The Frog chorus and the god Dionysos, circulating in the city and fretting over events of the day, exemplify this blending.

Frogs’ treatment of gods may seem irreverent or sacrilegious to modern readers, but it is a product of a society that did not revere authority figures in the same way that modern people tend to. The lampooning of Dionysos does not necessarily reflect lack of belief. The ancient Athenians would have taken honoring the gods very seriously, but what mattered with respect to the gods was not necessarily reverential treatment but paying them their due honors. This was accomplished through festivals and sacrifices that acknowledged their power. Through these festivals and sacrifices, the community acted as one to invite the gods’ goodwill and protection. In Frogs, Dionysos is the butt of jokes, but he is also shown to be concerned for the welfare of Athens, to have fought on the side of Athens in a recent sea battle, and to be on a mission to save the city.

Frogs was staged in 405 at the Lenaia, a winter festival generally attended by local Athenian audiences (poor weather restricted travel from other regions). At the time of Frogs’ production, Athens was on the brink of losing a disastrous war with its neighbor Sparta that had drained their resources and curtailed their democracy. A pervasive question of the day was whether and how to save the city from defeat and ignominy. (Indeed, they would not be able to, as one year later, Athens was sieged and starved into submission.) Against this backdrop, Aristophanes tells the story of Dionysos’ descent into the underworld (a stock narrative known as a katabasis) to retrieve Athens’ greatest tragedian, who will become the savior of the city.

In the opening scene, Dionysos and Xanthias enter the stage arguing over what kind of jokes are appropriate to make, emphasizing, in just a few lines, Frogs’ metanarrative motif, its interest in subverting expectations, and its playful approach to boundaries. This is also reflected in Dionysos’ costume. He wears feminine clothing (a saffron-colored dress and boots) associated with Dionysiac rituals that sometimes included cross-dressing. In addition, he wears a lion skin and carries a club, tokens that are associated with the demi-god Herakles, who had his own katabasis when he retrieved Kerberos as part of his twelve labors. Dionysos himself represents boundary crossing, and he is on his way to cross a literal boundary between the upper and under worlds.

The boundary between freedom and enslavement is also emphasized throughout the play. Xanthias wants to make “the usual gags,” but Dionysos forbids him (172). In the process of begging Xanthias not to make the same typical jokes, both inevitably make those same jokes. Though Dionysos is a god and Xanthias enslaved, it is Xanthias who rides on the donkey, yet he also carries his own burdens (the baggage pole on his shoulder). As a result, it is not clear who is in charge. Who is wise, and who is a fool? Xanthias is put upon and forbidden from entering Charon’s boat because he did not fight at Arginousai, but he is not portrayed as less courageous, capable, or worthy than Dionysos. This may also reflect contemporary attitudes about enslavement in Athens. Enslaved people came from all over the Mediterranean, including other Greek states, as a consequence both of war and a slave trade that was a topic of debate at that time.

The first scene is full of banter and gags among the three characters on stage. As with Xanthias and Dionysos, Herakles and Dionysos’ conversations feature a rapid back-and-forth, with Herakles questioning why Dionysos wants to retrieve Euripides in particular. The playwright Sophokles has also recently died, perhaps during the time that Aristophanes was composing Frogs, but Dionysos feels confident that the “rogue” Euripides will be willing to return to “escape back [to Athens]” while Sophokles, who is “even-tempered,” “won’t mind death” (175). These seem to be plays on the two tragedians’ reputations while alive and active, which contemporary theatergoers would be well aware of. Euripides was a popular target in comic plays. Similarly, Aristophanes incorporates jokes about Herakles’ legendary appetites. To help him understand the profound longing he feels for Euripides, Dionysos asks if Herakles has “ever been struck by a sudden desire for—soup” (175).

One atypical structural feature of Frogs is its use of two choruses and contests. The first, the Chorus of Frogs, makes its appearance at the end of what Halliwell calls scene one. The competition between the Chorus and Dionysos prefigures the later, extended competition between Aischylos and Euripides.