The Frogs

The spine is required. The god of the theatre goes down to bring back a poet because the city has no good one left, and comes back with a different poet from the one he went for. That reversal is the play’s argument, and the contest that produces it cannot be removed. Much of the first half is detachable routine of the Old Comic kind: the slave’s complaints about his load, the corpse who will not carry the bags for less than his price, the lion skin passed back and forth between master and slave, the innkeepers’ abuse, the whipping test to tell god from mortal. They are funny, and some carry the theme of masters and slaves that the parabasis turns political, but they could be cut or exchanged without loss to what the play knows. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve is that loose first half: the core is strong, and the cap is cleared by a tenth.

Score: 7.6 / 10

The play brings into the open a claim that can be stated and holds: that a city’s poetry is part of its survival, and that a culture near exhaustion turns to its dead to be saved. It makes this an argument, not a mood. In the contest both poets accept one criterion, that a poet is admired for skill, for good counsel and for making the citizens better, and then disagree about everything that follows from it: whether art should show men as they are or as they should be, whether the household and the market belong on the tragic stage. The disclosure is double, because the judge is a cowardly, greedy god who settles the matter by whim and by a political test rather than on art, and the play knows it. That self-knowledge is part of what it uncovers. Held below the top because its truth is argued inside a comic frame that never commits to its own verdict.

Score: 8.3 / 10

The play rises, but not often, and its height is chiefly of beauty rather than grandeur or terror. The procession of the initiates through the meadows of the dead, with its hymns to Iacchus, to Demeter and to the light of the mysteries, has a real radiance. The parabasis turns from jokes to a grave address to the city on the eve of disaster, and the close, with torches, the chorus’s prayer and Aeschylus leaving his chair to Sophocles, ends in something like ceremony. Most of the play’s energy is comic exhilaration instead: the frogs’ chorus, the duels of parody, the weighing of verses. Exhilaration is not the sublime as this axis measures it, and a comedy is not charged for being one; but the height is reached a few times, not sustained.

Score: 7.8 / 10

Myth built, not evoked. The plot is a descent to the dead and a return with one who was lost, on the pattern of Heracles fetching Cerberus, which Dionysus copies with lion skin and club, and of Orpheus going down for the lost, here a poet. The god who descends is the god of the festival at which the play is staged, so the descent is also the theatre seeking its own source. The Eleusinian chorus makes it an initiation: the god who sets out ignorant, a coward and a reader of Euripides, is taught, and returns with a judgment he did not go down to make. Death and renewal, the city’s and the art’s, bear the play’s weight. Held a tenth under the bar because the myth is held in parody and the comic Dionysus is as much a type as a figure of depth: the archetype structures the play more than it deepens it.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The departure is real: a comedy that gives its whole second half to a contest of poetics, staged as a formal debate and fought by exact parody of each poet’s style. Literary criticism before this was scattered and implicit; here it is the action. The stake was political as well. In the parabasis, at a moment of near defeat, Aristophanes urged that the citizens disfranchised after the oligarchy of 411 have their rights restored, beside the slaves freed for rowing at Arginusae, and the city honoured the advice. But the turn was made on a prepared path. Aristophanes had already put Euripides on stage, in Acharnians and Thesmophoriazusae, and Cratinus and others had made poets and poetry comic subjects. The wager is bold in its completeness, less so in its kind.

Score: 8.2 / 10

The form is the instrument of the criticism. The play does not describe the two styles; it makes them audible and then tests them with stage machinery. Aeschylus ruins every Euripidean prologue by tacking on “lēkythion apōlesen”
“lost his little oil-flask”, and one repeated half-line exposes the slack, interchangeable syntax of the Euripidean opening. The scales on which lines are weighed turn Aeschylus’ heaviness, his chariots and corpses, into literal weight. The lyric parodies imitate the stretched, repeated syllables of the monody and the Aeschylean refrain. The agon, a fixed form of the genre, is made to do what a treatise could not: let an audience judge with its ears. Held below the top band because the first half’s form is the stock comic journey and does less of this work.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The evidence of yield is long and continuous. The play was read in antiquity and in Byzantium as a school text, is the earliest extended source for how Athenians heard their tragedians, and has gone on generating argument: whether Aristophanes’ sympathies lie with Aeschylus or are divided; what a choice made on political grounds says about the claims of art; what the Eleusinian frame means for Dionysus, read as his initiation; how the two halves cohere; whether the text was revised. Critics of tragedy return to it in each generation, Nietzsche among them. Held below the higher bands because much of its surface is topical, its jokes on Cleophon, Cleigenes, Theramenes and the rest need a commentary, return yields as much to the scholar as to the reader, and its depth runs in a narrower channel than the greatest tragedies’.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The field is the Greek literature of the fifth century BC, with Attic drama at its centre, and the European tradition of literary judgment that grew from it. The force is high. The play is the first sustained work of literary criticism in European literature, and it frames judgment as a contest between an older and a newer art, a moral and a technical standard: a reorganisation of what could be said about poetry, not an accent. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the opposition it fixed, Aeschylus grand and Euripides clever, decadent and corrosive, shaped the ancient lives of the poets, the Alexandrian view of tragedy and, two millennia on, Nietzsche’s account of Euripides as the death of tragedy; Plato’s and Aristotle’s arguments over what poetry does to citizens join a quarrel this play staged first; and its descendants in form run from Lucian’s dialogues of the dead to the quarrels of ancients and moderns. Its reach within comedy itself is smaller.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Survival is demonstrated over some twenty-four centuries, and the text is whole. It has been read without a break: carried through antiquity, chosen for the Byzantine school selection of Aristophanes with Wealth and Clouds, preserved in the principal medieval manuscripts, the Ravenna and Venice codices among them, and printed, taught and translated since. Charged against it, on the axis’s own terms: Old Comedy carries the most topical surface of any classical form, and much of the play is fixed to the winter of 405, its demagogues, its generals and its freed rowers. Its presence since antiquity has been largely in the classroom and the academy, and the stage revives it far less than the tragedies it judges. That bears on presence; form and fabric are intact.

Score: 9.4 / 10

Command of the medium of the highest order. Aristophanes writes in many metres and registers at once: colloquial iambic dialogue, the initiates’ hymns, the frogs’ onomatopoeic chorus, “brekekekex koax koax”, and a pastiche of two tragic styles so exact that scholars, ancient and modern, use it as evidence for those styles. The Aeschylean compound, the Euripidean prologue with its genealogy, the monody with its stretched syllables: each is caught and exaggerated. At the moment of choice the play turns Euripides’ own line from Hippolytus against him: “hē glōtt’ omōmok’”
“my tongue swore”. A long contest is paced by changing its instrument at each stage: argument, prologues, lyrics, scales, politics. What is credited is what the text shows; the music of the metres is not credited beyond it.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the slapstick of the door scenes and the grave contest of poetics. They do not plainly obey one law. Threads run between them: Dionysus’ cowardice and his growth into a judge; the theme of masters and slaves, from the slave under his load to the parabasis’ plea for the disfranchised; and the Eleusinian chorus, present in both halves, which frames the whole as an initiation. Charged: the frogs vanish after their scene; the quest for Euripides is quietly redirected; the lion skin and the Heracles disguise drop out of the second half; and an apparent doublet in the closing political questions shows a seam. The unity of the play is a long critical question because the play gives it reason. The law that governs it is the comic festival’s, wide enough to hold both halves, and loose.

Score: 7.8 / 10

For a single comedy of about 1,533 lines it holds a great deal in one structure: the sacred, in Dionysus, the Eleusinian mysteries and the house of Pluto; death and the dead; the city at war and at the edge of defeat; citizenship and its forfeit; slavery and its reward; the household of master and servant; and tragedy itself as a civic institution. They are joined through one action. The god’s journey is the city’s search for a counsellor, and the poets fight their contest on the question of how to save the city. What it does not hold is consciousness in depth or the family as an order: the persons are types, and the inward life is absent. The form allows a wide reach and the play uses it, short of the encompassing works.

Score: 8.0 / 10