Preview The Frogs
Birds a search for the perfect society, Festival Time a feminist trial of Euripides and Frogs a celebration of and debate around the theatre.
The Frogs(405 B.C.)This work is part of a series of two works by Aristophanes that digitizes the Easton Press book containing those plays. (The other work is "The Birds.")
The Play:
Frogs was produced in 405 BCE, shortly after the deaths of Sophocles and Euripides. Dionysus, the patron god of theater, journeys to the underworld to retrieve Euripides. There he is recruited to judge a contest between the traditional Aeschylus and the modern Euripides, a contest that yields both sparkling comedy and insight on ancient literary taste.
The master of ancient Greek comic drama, Aristophanes combined slapstick, humour and cheerful vulgarity with acute political observations. In The Frogs, written during the Peloponnesian War, Dionysus descends to the Underworld to bring back a poet who can help Athens in its darkest hour, and stages a great debate to help him decide between the traditional wisdom of Aeschylus and the brilliant modernity of Euripides.
Aristophanes, one of the world's greatest comic dramatists, has been admired since antiquity for his iridescent wit and beguiling fantasy, exuberant language, and brilliant satire of the social, intellectual, and political life of Athens at its height.
The list of books you might like
