Frogs
Batrachoi
Athenian tragedy has declined so badly since the deaths of its great masters that even the god of theater must descend to the underworld to bring one back, and judging whose poetry the city needs more becomes a matter of civic survival.
- literary criticism staged as comic contest
- Aeschylus versus Euripides on tragedy's purpose
- poetry's civic responsibility in wartime
- a journey to the underworld as comic device
- produced in the war's final, desperate year
Frogs, which won first prize in 405 BC in the last year of the Peloponnesian War, stages the god Dionysus traveling to the underworld, accompanied by his slave Xanthias and heckled along the way by a chorus of frogs, to retrieve a great tragedian because no living poet can match the dead ones after the recent deaths of Euripides and Sophocles. Once there, Dionysus judges a formal poetic contest between Aeschylus and Euripides, weighing their verses on a literal scale and debating the civic value of tragedy, whether it should uplift audiences with grand moral seriousness, as Aeschylus's defenders claim, or reflect ordinary human speech and psychology, as Euripides argues for his own innovations. Dionysus ultimately chooses to bring back Aeschylus rather than Euripides, judging that a city facing military catastrophe needs poetry that restores civic courage more than poetry that merely reflects its current, demoralized state.
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