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In the winter of 405 B.C.E., Aristophanes The Frogs won first prize at the Lenaean Festival in Athens. It was Aristophanes penultimate play, wittiest certainly, the most unusual and instantly a favorite. The Lenaean Festival, which occurred annually in the months we call January and February, centered on ritual worship of the god Dionysos and, like other Dionysian festivals, featured competitions for tragic and comic drama that were performed in a theater at the base of the Acropolis. Amphitheater seats, carved into the rock, accommodated perhaps as many as seventeen thousand spectators.
In 405, the exigencies of war reduced the number of comedies produced in competition at the festival from five to three. Still, it was a festivalthe town shut down for it, and the citizenry helped themselves to liberal amounts of the fruits of Dionysos for the sake of the cult, if not to ward off the cold as they bunched together in the winter air. The scene certainly had more the tone of our contemporary sporting events than the inside of a Manhattan theater, although the audience, drawn from all elements of Athenian society, seems, on the basis of the plays performed for them, about as sophisticated as a playwright could hope for. A city official, assigned to his office by lot, chose the scripts in the competition. A similar official awarded the prizes, no doubt going by audience approval. Nothing could be further removed from the incestuous coterie of New Yorks playwrights, critics, producers, agents and moneymen.
That the process, both for comedy and for tragedy, resulted in such brilliant theater is a testament to the high level of culture and intelligence of the ancient Athenian audience. But then, the talents and achievements in fifth-century B.C.E. Athens are part of the legend of Western history: the unique political system that gave adult freeborn males the right to vote and to govern themselves; the public architecture, such as the Parthenon; the great theatrical festivals that inspired awe in foreign visitors; a society in which men like Aeschylus, Euripides, Herodotos, Plato, Sophocles, Socrates, Thucydidesthe list is endlessmight have been spotted at the assembly, the theater or marketplace.
Soon enough there was empire. What began as a group of city-states allied for self-defense against the Persians under the leadership of Athenseach paying money to Athens to provide ships and rowersdegenerated into forced tribute when the Persian threat diminished but Athens appetite for money did not. Athenian arrogance in dealing with its tribute states gradually infected its relationship with the entire Greek world. Soon a league of city-states, mostly from the Peloponnesos and led by the military might of Sparta, mounted a challenge to Athens pretensions. The Pelopon-nesian War, as it is called, continued for decades on land and at sea, and finally ended in Athens defeat.
The audience for Aristophanes Frogs in 405 had known war on and off since 432. A fierce plague had ravaged the city in 430, yet it made a comeback. Fifteen years later, the Athenians suffered the distress of lost men and ships in an attempted invasion of Sicily, an ill-advised venture that encouraged an aristocratic revolution in Athens in 411. While the success of this revolution was short-lived, bitter divisions remained between the war party and the peace party.
How did Athens survive? The city was connected to its port by long protective walls between which food was brought to the populace. This long corridor also served as the cramped, fetid living space for refugees from the fields of Attica. In peacetime they had rarely visited Athens; now they were a constant presence in the assembly as well as the festival audiences. In the last decade of the fifth century, a comic playwright would have to play to anger, frustration and despair in his audience.
One might say the recent deaths of Sophocles and Euripides in 406 gave Aristophanes topical material with which he could exploit that mood. In this play, he presents Dionysos, the divine source of drama, going into Hades to fetch Euripides back to restore tragic drama to its moral and philosophical seriousness. Aristophanes also gives the theme of restoration a political slant when he has the Chorus plead for a general amnesty for Athenian citizens who have been ostracized and exiled. Nostalgia for the good old days is a theme that runs throughout the play as the Chorus yearns for the superior soldiers and politicians of earlier times.
Upon Dionysos arrival in Hades, the god finds Euripides and Aeschylus locked in combat over who should hold the throne of theater in the afterlife, and, with this device, Aristophanes converts his plot into a contest over the relative merits of the two playwrights. What follows is one of the all-time great duels of theatrical wit and parodyline after line of brilliant pseudo-Aeschylean and Euripidean language and sentiments perverted into hilarious bathos and buffoonery. Caught up by the competition, Dionysos suddenly remembers how much he likes what he considers the nobler drama of Aeschylus. Since, however, Dionysos is also depicted as a simple-minded stumblebum, the value of his final judgment is itself an open question.
Unfortunately, little has survived to indicate what the personalities were behind the major names of ancient theater. It has been said that Aeschylus wanted only the words He fought at Marathon inscribed on his tombstone, as though the modest act of soldiery and the defense of his city at its most dangerous hour were what this aristocrat judged to be his most significant achievements. Euripides, on the other hand, seems better known, partly because Aristophanes parodied him in so many plays. A commonplace notion is that Euripides was the son of a greengrocer, which probably means that he wasnt an aristocrat, that his family was in trade and did not own land. While Aeschylus tried to make tragic drama that had the remote mysterious grandeur of Pindaric victory odes, Euripides was more modern, caught up in the new philosophical questioning of Athens traditional aristocratic culture.
An English translation of Aristophanes language can only suggest its complexities. Unlike tragic dramas rigid convention of idiom, the comic playwright used an extraordinary mélange of language: epic formulae, lyric and tragic diction, slang, intellectual talkall of it mixed, changing with lightning speed from sentence to sentence, enchanting and intoxicating. The structure of an Aristophanic play is loose as well, and can accommodate a plot, a chorus, char-acters, numerous detours, pauses for sermonizing, gag routines and even, as in The Frogs, a radical change in direction.
Invectives delivered against prominent figures in Athens did not so much indicate the political position of the playwright as they were a given of the comic medium, similar to the harsh humor of roasts today at, say, the Washington Press Club. Modern-day audiences might be surprised by the particular if not relentless focus on erections and flatulence, but coarseness and obscenity were hallmarks of Old Comedy. In Athenian culture, erections were thought to have some apotropaic magic. Flatulenceno doubt a constant in a society where beans were a staple of the dietmight be considered a comic analogue to tragedys hamartia, that is, the missing of the mark, and indicative of humankinds fragility. Athenians would have been amazed at our cultures hesitation at frank speaking about the body and its functions.
At the end of The Frogs, Dionysos chooses Aeschylus because he is better for the citya greater, moral and more religious force than the sophistic, intellectual, rationalist iconoclast Euripides. It is this dramatization of a failure of nerve that, more than anything else, tells us that Athens time in the sun is coming to an end. Indeed, Athens surrendered to the Spartan alliance the following year and never regained its former power. Theater survived, but became more a venue for revivals or light entertainments. Though Aristophanes lived for almost twenty more years, at least he was spared the knowledge that centuries later his lively, energetic Athens would become a bloodless, quiet university town where the sons of the Roman elite went to be educated in the superior Greek culture they had pushed off the worlds stage.
Charles Rowan Beye is Distinguished Professor of Classics Emeritus at the City University of New York. His most recent book, Odysseus: A Life, was published in February by Hyperion. He is also a contributing editor at greekworks.com.
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