Aristophanes’ Frogs

Aristophanes’ Frogs Week 9 Emmanuela Bakola & Marchella Ward

Old Comedy • NOT just Aristophanes (one of c. 60 poets) – and the genre is much older than him • Thousands of fragments (c. 800 plays in the fifth century) • We have a tiny percentage of the comic output: much more varied genre than we realise

Huge variety of different styles of comedy • We make a conventional (Alexandrian) distinction: Old Comedy // Middle Comedy // New Comedy • Accurate? Convenient but unrealistic • Old Comedy: 5th C, political, obscene • Middle Comedy: 4th C, mythological burlesque, little interest in politics • New Comedy: late 4th C, domestic comedy

Silk (2013) in Bakola, Prauscello and Telò eds. Greek Comedy and the Discourse of Genres warns against categorisation:

Aristotelian beginnings (1449a32-49b9): Composition of plots originally came from Sicily; Crates (450-440 BCE) was responsible for departing from lampoon into comic plots • Greek comedy is: • Competitive: leads poets to innovate quickly (accounts for the variety of styles?) • Experimental: and a two-way relationship with audiences • Self-reflexive: investment in defining the genre and its place in society • Reflective (of society): BUT not a straightforward mirror

Comedy vs. Tragedy? + end of Plato’s Symposium (Socrates is trying to get Agathon and Aristophanes to agree that comedy and tragedy are really the same thing)

Playwrights and actors seem to have been split exclusively between the two genres • BUT same theatre and same festival context • Other similarities? • Taplin (1986), ‘Fifth-Century Tragedy and Comedy: a Synkrisis’ in JHS 106, 163-74

Tragedy • Aristophanes’ comedy defines itself against / within the world of tragedy – other playwrights used other genres • E.g. in Acharnians (425 BCE), Dicaeopolis dresses up as the tragic hero Telephos (Euripides) Kômôdia vs. trugôidia (‘wine song’)

What do comedy and tragedy have in common?

Similarities • Occasion (Dionysia / Lenaia) • Theatrical Space • Performance: masks, costumes, aulos • Chorus • Political / social engagement • Also shares these with satyr drama

But… • Spectacle: extravagant chorus and parodos • Costumes and masks • Special effects (e.g. flying, boats, weather!) • Expense: higher production values

What’s in a comedy? • Contemporary settings vs. tragedy’s obsession with the heroic past • Usually assume that tragedy = myth and comedy = contemporary material • BUT there are mythological comedies, and comedies that parody epic, e.g. Cratinus’ Odysseis(Homeric parody)

Structure

Music • Made up of musical set pieces • BUT music is also crucial to defining roles in Greek comedy Hughes (2012), Performing Greek Comedy

Language • Not high artificial language like tragedy; wide range of styles from obscenity to para-tragic language (often very close together) • Also very physical genre

Transgression • In comedy, the rules about causality, time and space etc that we find in tragedy do not hold • Transgressing limits and breaking rules is a recurring trope of comedy • Ability to suspend logic / ‘naturalism’ • Dramatic illusion? Comedies allude to their nature as performance

Aristophanes’ Frogs

Journey (in search of the best kind of poetry) • “what makes good poetry?” is a central question throughout Frogs • From l.35 onwards (arrival at Heracles’ house) the conversation becomes about Dionysus’ love for tragedy

How many of the qualities ascribed to different jokes here are characteristic of the conversation about tragedy? (old / new, masculine / feminine, / noble and urbane / degenerate…) • The journey ends with a formal judgement: literary criticism is played out onstage

Introduction to the agon (814-29): poets introduced through their imagery

Aeschylus vs. Euripides • Aeschylus is a raw, natural force (monster?) in the imagination of the comic poet • ‘real’ poetry? Inspired, like epic, and invested in old heroic values • Elite / old appeal • vs.Euripides’ technical ability (dexiotes = cleverness / sophistication) • Learning and study of sources, deals with the everyday • Exciting for (younger) audiences but morally reprehensible / irreverent • Appeals to the masses (the young / new)

Aeschylus • a gushing stream of water (Frogs 1005) • Aeschylus as part of the mystery cult (Frogs 885-7, 1259) • Aeschylus and the Iliad (Frogs 928-30) • Aeschylus as Achilles of the Myrmidons (Frogs 832ff)

Why does Aeschylus win?

Journey (into the underworld) Edmonds III (2004), Myths of the Underworld Journey: • katabasis

Initiation into the mysteries • Dionysus goes through a process of initiation into Eleusinian / Dionysiac mysteries. • See: Bowie, Aristophanes, myth, ritual and comedy; Lada-Richards, Imitating Dionysus • Rite of passage: symbolic death and rebirth (Frogs 117f) • Motifs of seeing and knowing (belong to initiation rituals) – Dionysus sees the initiates at 313ff

Frogs 312ff • Ends with Dionysus’ return to the living having witnessed the agon

Dionysus Segal (1961), ‘The Character and Cults of Dionysus and the Unity of the Frogs’, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, 65, 207-242

Is this the Dionysus of tragedy?

Questions? • For the seminar next week: • Think about: Why does Aeschylus win? • Read: Lada-Richards (1999), Initiating Dionysus: Ritual and Theatre in Aristophanes’ Frogs

Aristophanes’ Frogs