Like 'The Birds' this play rather avoids politics than otherwise, its
leading _motif_, over and above the pure fun and farce for their own sake
of the burlesque descent into the infernal regions, being a literary one,
an onslaught on Euripides the Tragedian and all his works and ways.
It was produced in the year 405 B.C., the year after 'The Birds,' and
only one year before the Peloponnesian War ended disastrously for the
Athenian cause in the capture of the city by Lysander. First brought out
at the Lenaean festival in January, it was played a second time at the
Dionysia in March of the same year--a far from common honour. The drama
was not staged in the Author's own name, we do not know for what reasons,
but it won the first prize, Phrynichus' 'Muses' being second.
The plot is as follows. The God Dionysus, patron of the Drama, is
dissatisfied with the condition of the Art of Tragedy at Athens, and
resolves to descend to Hades in order to bring back again to earth one of
the old tragedians--Euripides, he thinks, for choice. Dressing himself
up, lion's skin and club complete, as Heracles, who has performed the
same perilous journey before, and accompanied by his slave Xanthias (a
sort of classical Sancho Panza) with the baggage, he starts on the
fearful expedition.
Coming to the shores of Acheron, he is ferried over in Charon's
boat--Xanthias has to walk round--the First Chorus of Marsh Frogs (from
which the play takes its title) greeting him with prolonged croakings.
Approaching Pluto's Palace in fear and trembling, he knocks timidly at
the gate. Being presently admitted, he finds a contest on the point of
being held before the King of Hades and the Initiates of the Eleusinian
Mysteries, who form the Second Chorus, between Aeschylus, the present
occupant of the throne of tragic excellence in hell, and the pushing,
self-satisfied, upstart Euripides, who is for ousting him from his pride
of place.
Each poet quotes in turn from his Dramas, and the indignant Aeschylus
makes fine fun of his rival's verses, and shows him up in the usual
Aristophanic style as a corrupter of morals, a contemptible casuist, and
a professor of the dangerous new learning of the Sophists, so justly held
in suspicion by true-blue Athenian Conservatives. Eventually a pair of
scales is brought in, and verses alternately spouted by the two
candidates are weighed against each other, the mighty lines of the Father
of Tragedy making his flippant, finickin little rival's scale kick the
beam every time.
Dionysus becomes a convert to the superior merits of the old school of
tragedy, and contemptuously dismisses Euripides, to take Aeschylus back
with him to the upper world instead, leaving Sophocles meantime in
occupation of the coveted throne of tragedy in the nether regions.
Needless to say, the various scenes of the journey to Hades, the crossing
of Acheron, the Frogs' choric songs, and the trial before Pluto, afford
opportunities for much excellent fooling in our Author's very finest vein
of drollery, and "seem to have supplied the original idea for those
modern burlesques upon the Olympian and Tartarian deities which were at
one time so popular."
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