The Silence of the Frogs

Tacitly poking fun at Dead Poets

In late fifth-century BC Athens Euripides wrote gripping tragic plays while Aristophanes staged exuberant comedies. Aristophanes knew the works of his tragic rival intimately. He regularly parodied them, often quoting Euripides (“paratragically”) for humorous purposes. Euripides appears as a character in two Aristophanic comedies, most extensively in Aristophanes’ Frogs of 405 BC, where he competes in the Underworld with the long dead tragedian Aeschylus for the prize of being the greatest of dead tragic poets - and loses.

At this date Euripides had only recently died in Macedon, in the far north of Greece, where he had emigrated some years earlier and produced his last play, Bacchae. The Bacchae wasn’t staged in Athens until some years after Euripides died, but there are close points of contact with Frogs (the title Batrachoi in Greek is almost an echo of Bakchai), making it almost impossible that Aristophanes did not know, or know of, his tragic rival’s last play. But the extent to which Aristophanes was familiar with Bacchae has long been a matter of scholarly debate, with some supposing he knew the text well and others positing knowledge of little more than its title and general approach. The central character of both Frogs and Bacchae is the god Dionysus, and there is a secondary chorus of mystic initiates. Other points of contact include:

- Dionysus in disguise:  In Frogs, Dionysus disguises himself as Heracles; in Bacchae, Dionysus appears disguised as a young stranger.
- Dionysus on a journey: In Frogs, he travels to the underworld to retrieve Euripides; in Bacchae, he travels to Thebes to establish his cult.
- Dionysus is disrespected: In Frogs, he's ridiculed by various characters; in Bacchae, he's insulted by Pentheus, king of Thebes.
-  Dionysus's identity is obscure: In Frogs he's not recognized as a god by Aeacus; in Bacchae, by Pentheus.
- Dionysus asserts his power: In Frogs, he decides the outcome of the poetry contest; in Bacchae, he destroys his detractors in the end.

Despite these thematic similarities, Aristophanes does not once quote a line of Bacchae, though he quotes from other Euripidean texts. This could add weight to the view he had not seen the text of Bacchae, but only so long as opportunities could have arisen for him to insert verbatim quotations.

To determine the latter, I scrutinised both plays to see if there are any mischievous parodic possibilities for paratragic quotes. There are: I found at least a dozen lines of Bacchae that Aristophanes might easily have inserted into the Frogs (as transmitted), but did not. This proves (to my satisfaction, at least) that he didn’t know that text, even if he was obviously well aware of elements of the plot.

For instance, when Aeschylus is competing with Euripides in Frogs and presenting some of the solemn lines of his tragedies, Euripides scoffs at his rival’s repetitiveness:

Aeschylus (quoting): “Become my saviour and my ally, I pray. 
                                       For I've come to this land and I return...”
Euripides:                    Clever (sophos) old Aeschylus, saying the same thing twice!
Dionysus:                     How twice?
Euripides:                                                  Look at the line, and I'll explain.  
                                      “I've come to this land,” he says, “and I return.”  
                                      Well, “I've come” is the same as “I return”!

Αἰσχύλος:                    “σωτὴρ γενοῦ μοι σύμμαχός τ’ αἰτουμένῳ. 
                                        ἥκω γὰρ ἐις γῆν τήνδε καὶ κατέρχομαι — ”
Εὐριπίδης:                     δὶς ταὐτὸν ἡμῖν εἶπεν ὁ σοφὸς Αἰσχύλος.
Διόνυσος:                      πῶς δίς;
Εὐριπίδης:                                    σκόπει τὸ ῥῆμ’, ἐγὼ δέ σοι φράσω. 
                                       “ἥκω γὰρ ἐς γῆν,” φησί, “καὶ κατέρχομαι”. 
                                       “ἥκω” δὲ ταὐτόν ἐστι τῷ “κατέρχομαι”.      
                                                                                                                              [Frogs 1152–7]

The exchange would have offered an opportunity for Aristophanes to make Aeschylus retort with a memorably jingly line from Euripides’ Bacchae about being clever (sophos) at arguing, but not in understanding:

[Aeschylus: ]                  You’re oh-so clever - except where you should be clever.
[Αἰσχύλος:]                    σοφὸς σοφὸς σύ, πλὴν ἃ δεῖ σ’ εἶναι σοφόν. 
                                                                                                                          [Bacchae 655]

The audience couldn’t be expected to know the line (or its context), given that few if any would have had the chance to see the Bacchae in Macedon. But spectators would have readily heard it as a Euripidean tragic line, especially if the actor enunciated it as such; and Aristophanes’ cheekiness in quoting Euripides at such a juncture would surely have made them laugh.

I’ve compiled some potential quotations from the Bacchae - to demonstrate their absence - in a recent article, ‘The Silence of the Frogs’. It appears in a volume of essays entitled Commenting on the Past (Brill 2025), honouring my friend Professor Chris Kraus, with whom I once discussed Bacchae and Frogs at Oxford in the early 2000s.