Aristophanes, tragedy and the motif of regeneration in the Frogs

Few works of literary criticism have had an effect as drastic in shaping our perceptions of Greek tragedy as Aristophanes’ comedy The Frogs. The belief – still taught in many schools today – that the ‘old’ tragedy of Aeschylus was grand, but rather primitive, ‘epic’, but difficult and unapproachable for the common person, and that Euripides, his subversiveness and his experimentations were responsible for the gradual degeneration of the tragic genre are largely owed to the brilliant caricatures of the two tragic poets in Frogs. These perceptions were perpetuated and ossified by F. Nietzsche in his writings on Greek tragedy, but although they are based on actual elements of the authors’ styles and plays, they are, ultimately, distortions. However, they are distortions with a fascinating background. It is this background and its importance for making sense of the ending of the play that I want to explore in this piece.

To understand the reasons why Aristophanes chose to portray the two tragic poets in these terms, one should look at the intellectual and artistic context in which the comic poet composed his plays. In the fifth century, comedy was a genre that fiercely rivalled the popularity of tragedy. Tragedy was at the time an overwhelmingly dominant cultural phenomenon, reigning supreme in the Athenian performance scene – whereas until the early fifth century, the ‘stars’ were choral lyric and epic. In this crowded cultural environment, as soon as comedy was granted an official place at the dramatic festivals, it developed a deeply competitive attitude, ‘fighting’ to be taken as seriously as tragedy in its role in the polis and to survive in the Greek canon.

As a result, from its very beginnings, comedy made a target of the tragic plays that delighted the audiences in Athens and all around the Greek world. As we can see from the surviving fragments and plays, the genre as a whole openly rivalled tragedy, made fun of it, rejected it, distorted it, pointed to its flaws, inconsistencies and absurdities, and subverted it. At the same time, the obsession with tragedy, harbouring a deep fascination and admiration, gave comedy ample opportunities for its self-definition as a genre. For Aristophanes, especially, this became a pervasive preoccupation. There is no Aristophanic comedy that does not engage, to some level at least, with the cultural phenomenon of tragedy. But well before Aristophanes, other comic poets had entered this arena of ‘doing comedy through tragedy’: notably Cratinus, one of the three canonical poets of ancient comedy and older rival of Aristophanes. In the fragments that survive from his works, we can see extensive parody, and engagement with, the tragedy of Aeschylus, including of the Oresteia and the (then perceived as genuinely Aeschylean) Prometheus trilogy. Most impressively of all, however, in these same plays we find Cratinus defining himself as the ‘Aeschylus of comedy’. In the 430s that Cratinus flourished, Aeschylus had already been recognised as a canonical classic, and even more so, as the ‘father’ of tragedy. So, Cratinus, basking in the sun of his older (and now dead) fellow Athenian playwright Aeschylus and appropriating the status he had in the minds of the Athenians, presented himself through his own plays as doing and being the ‘new Aeschylus’ – of comedy.

When Aristophanes entered the comic competitions in the early 420s, the poets’ ‘game’ of aligning themselves with a major personality of the Athenian cultural scene had been around for a while. Different poets had aligned themselves with Homer, Hesiod, Archilochus, Hipponax, Solon and others. For the rising star Aristophanes, who had only recently entered the competitive arena of comedy, a major response to his older rival Cratinus ‘the Aeschylean’ was overdue. So, as early as 425 BC, in his oldest surviving play The Men from Acharnae Aristophanes aligned himself with Euripides – and he continued to do so until the end of the 410s. To the old glory of Aeschylus, Aristophanes contrasted the modern inventiveness of Euripides. He also used as basis of his and Euripides’ ‘shared genius’ the idea that both poets were innovators, that they did new things with their old and (allegedly tired) art, comedy and tragedy. At the time, Euripides was known as an experimenter with music, content, form and other components of the tragic art, and was understood to be pushing the genre’s boundaries, so Aristophanes’ majestic stroke had a basis in reality. Aligning himself with that perception, Aristophanes claimed that his comedy was experimental, original and far from repetitive. In contrast, he presented his older rivals (including Cratinus) as has-beens, who, having ran out of ideas, had brought the art of comedy to the level of cheap farce. These are claims that we can see in the very beginning of Frogs, when Xanthias and Dionysus argue about what jokes to make. In the familiar Aristophanic manner, both claims – of originality and of sophistication – are undercut at the same time, as the play both repeats the same jokes and indulges in low farcical humour!

Furthermore, for Aristophanes, innovation came from learnedness and honed technique. So, as opposed to his older rivals, whom he portrayed as composing comedy by relying on inspiration (often inadequate), Aristophanes claimed that he composed great comedy thanks to his books, his vast knowledge of other poetry, as well as to his great skill. In comedy’s relentlessly physical imagination, skill became a craft, and inspiration a reliance on wine. So, Aristophanes constructed his master poet Euripides as a crafty individual (and later a master builder), and presented old Cratinus, who claimed to be inspired by Dionysus, as a mere drunk who wet his bed and could not fulfil his conjugal duties. For, as the last jibe suggests, comic poets connected artistic creativity with sexual prowess and fertility: capitalising on this connection, Aristophanes presented himself as the boyfriend of comedy whilst branding Cratinus as an old drunk who was unable to have an erection.

The poetic contest of Frogs is largely built on the binary ‘old and inspired’ poets (Cratinus-Aeschylus) vs. ‘new and technical poets’ (Aristophanes Euripides). When the play starts, Dionysus sets off on a journey in search of good poetry, namely poetry that is capable of regenerating the ‘dead’ cultural life of Athens. At this point, as Dionysus’ passion for everything modern and experimental suggests, he believes that good poetry is embodied in Euripides, the poet of innovation and experimentation. Dionysus, in other words, largely embodies the Aristophanic attitude that we saw above; we are thus justified to read this journey also as a poetic journey of no other than the poet ‘Aristophanes’ himself (or, more accurately, his poetic persona). Therefore, in many ways, Dionysus embodies the poet ‘Aristophanes’ going on a poetic journey in search of what constitutes good, fertile poetry.

However, as Dionysus-‘Aristophanes’ undergoes his journey, he gets initiated into the Dionysiac cult, which is embodied in this play by the initiates, the main chorus of the play. Through this process of initiation and his symbolic ‘death’ that his journey to the underworld effects, the play’s hero prepares himself for his own regeneration – a regeneration that we can now recognise to concern not only Dionysus, but also ‘Aristophanes’. In other words, in Frogs, after a long career of projecting a ‘Euripidean’ persona, ‘Aristophanes’ turns ‘Aeschylean’.

This regeneration comes gradually, but steadily. We find sperms of the Aristophanic ‘change of heart’ in the homage that the play pays to Cratinus, the ‘old and inspired’ poet whom here it identifies with the god Dionysus himself (Frogs 357). Furthermore, the whole atmosphere of the play is pervaded by a Dionysiac spirit, including a desire for transformation, a longing for things to change from what they have been. The play criticises new attitudes to politics, deplores the unreliability of the new politicians, and expresses the desire to go back to the old values, and trust the tried-and-tested citizens once again. Ultimately, the regeneration and transformation that the whole play builds up to comes about at the judgement of the poetic contest: Dionysus-‘Aristophanes’ chooses Aeschylus and drops Euripides, and alongside him, rejects the new, experimental and controversial way of being, and of making poetry.

But is Aristophanes, and the city, going to stick to what now seems an earnest pledge, or is this one more Aristophanic trick? Comedy’s discourse is notoriously slippery, and it is ultimately up to us to decide!