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Book: The Frogs
Author: Aristophanes
Publisher: Nabu Press (1 January 2010)
Language: Ancient Greek
Paperback: 158 pages
Item Weight: 296 g
Dimensions: 18.9 x 0.86 x 24.61 cm
Price: 1699/-
[Completed Reading in: 2019]
The period of Old Comedy at Athens began in 486 BC, when comedy first became part of the festival of the Greater Dionysia; by principle it ended in 388 BC, when Aristophanes produced his last play. During this period some 600 comedies were produced.
Aristophanes of Athens, the earliest comic playwright from whom whole works survive, was judged in antiquity to be the leading poet of Old Attic Comedy, a theatrical type of which he was one of the very last practitioners and of which his 11 surviving plays are our only complete examples.
His plays are valued predominantly for the cheerfulness of their humorousness and desire, for the wholesomeness and sophistication of their language, and for the light they throw on the domestic and political life of Athens in an important era of its history.
Legend has it that when the Syracusan tyrant Dionysius wanted to inform himself about “the republic of the Athenians,” Plato sent him the plays of Aristophanes.
‘Frogs’ is by common approval one of the finest achievements of Aristophanes.
The play was first performed at a Festival of Dionysus in Athens in 405 BC, at a time when the catastrophic Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta was nearing its conclusion. The production was so accepted that it received the unexpected honour of a second production and Aristophanes received an extraordinary award from the city.
In Frogs Dionysus, the wine god and patron deity of the Athenian dramatic festivals is a foremost character and the only one who is involved in the action all through the play.
In the first half of the play he is the anti-heroic and burlesque figure long familiar in comedy and satyr drama. In Cratinus’ Dionysus as Paris (Dionysalexandros) he had taken the place of Paris as judge of the prominent legendary beauty contest between Athena, Hera, and Aphrodite (with Helen as the prize); in Eupolis’ Taxiarchs the Athenian admiral Phormio ineffectively tried to teach him to be a sailor-warrior, as in Aristomenes’ Dionysus the Athlete he had been trained as an athlete.
In the second half of the play he arbitrates a competition between the poets Aeschylus and Euripides for supremacy in the art of tragedy.
Beyond being a landmark in the history of literary criticism, Frogs embraces two transcendent issues:
1) The decline of Athens as a great power, as the long Peloponnesian War (431-404) approached its end, and
2) The decline of tragedy as a great form of art, with the recent deaths of the last two paramount tragedians.
Aristophanes connects these two issues by portraying tragic poets as both exemplifying and shaping the moral and civic character of their times.
Aristophanes’ explanation to both — the renaissance of Aeschylus from the dead — is at once negative and hopeful: if there were no longer any living poets who could inspire the Athenians to greatness, at least the works of Aeschylus lived on and might motivate the Athenians to recapture the assets that had made their city unsurpassed in his day.
Author: Aristophanes
Publisher: Nabu Press (1 January 2010)
Language: Ancient Greek
Paperback: 158 pages
Item Weight: 296 g
Dimensions: 18.9 x 0.86 x 24.61 cm
Price: 1699/-
[Completed Reading in: 2019]
The period of Old Comedy at Athens began in 486 BC, when comedy first became part of the festival of the Greater Dionysia; by principle it ended in 388 BC, when Aristophanes produced his last play. During this period some 600 comedies were produced.
Aristophanes of Athens, the earliest comic playwright from whom whole works survive, was judged in antiquity to be the leading poet of Old Attic Comedy, a theatrical type of which he was one of the very last practitioners and of which his 11 surviving plays are our only complete examples.
His plays are valued predominantly for the cheerfulness of their humorousness and desire, for the wholesomeness and sophistication of their language, and for the light they throw on the domestic and political life of Athens in an important era of its history.
Legend has it that when the Syracusan tyrant Dionysius wanted to inform himself about “the republic of the Athenians,” Plato sent him the plays of Aristophanes.
‘Frogs’ is by common approval one of the finest achievements of Aristophanes.
The play was first performed at a Festival of Dionysus in Athens in 405 BC, at a time when the catastrophic Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta was nearing its conclusion. The production was so accepted that it received the unexpected honour of a second production and Aristophanes received an extraordinary award from the city.
In Frogs Dionysus, the wine god and patron deity of the Athenian dramatic festivals is a foremost character and the only one who is involved in the action all through the play.
In the first half of the play he is the anti-heroic and burlesque figure long familiar in comedy and satyr drama. In Cratinus’ Dionysus as Paris (Dionysalexandros) he had taken the place of Paris as judge of the prominent legendary beauty contest between Athena, Hera, and Aphrodite (with Helen as the prize); in Eupolis’ Taxiarchs the Athenian admiral Phormio ineffectively tried to teach him to be a sailor-warrior, as in Aristomenes’ Dionysus the Athlete he had been trained as an athlete.
In the second half of the play he arbitrates a competition between the poets Aeschylus and Euripides for supremacy in the art of tragedy.
Beyond being a landmark in the history of literary criticism, Frogs embraces two transcendent issues:
1) The decline of Athens as a great power, as the long Peloponnesian War (431-404) approached its end, and
2) The decline of tragedy as a great form of art, with the recent deaths of the last two paramount tragedians.
Aristophanes connects these two issues by portraying tragic poets as both exemplifying and shaping the moral and civic character of their times.
Aristophanes’ explanation to both — the renaissance of Aeschylus from the dead — is at once negative and hopeful: if there were no longer any living poets who could inspire the Athenians to greatness, at least the works of Aeschylus lived on and might motivate the Athenians to recapture the assets that had made their city unsurpassed in his day.
