Development of Ancient Greek Tragedy as Traced from Aristophanes’ The Frogs

Aristophanes’ The Frogs is a comedy, a latter genre of literature, but beneath its extravagant caricatures, he has some serious purpose. In the second part of the play there is a debate competition at the dinner table of Hades between Aeschylus and Euripides to acquire the seat of 'Best Tragic Poet'. The contest is held with Dionysus as judge. Actually, through this debate we can trace a development of ancient Greek tragedy—how the Greek tragedy was developed, from Aeschylus, in the hands of  Sophocles and Euripides, especially  of Euripides.

                                               

A long line of philosophers--which includes Plato, Aristotle, Saint Augustine, Diderot, Voltaire, Hume, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Freud, Benjamin and Delouse--have analysed, speculated upon and criticised the tragic form. Among them, Aristotle has given, in his Poetics, the widely accepted theory of tragedy which is based on the examples of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. According to Aristotle,

"Tragedy, then, is a process of imitating an action which has serious implications, is complete, and possesses magnitude; by means of language which has been made sensuously attractive, with each of its varieties found separately in the parts; enacted by the persons themselves and not presented through narrative; through a course of pity and fear completing the purification (catharsis, sometimes translated "purgation") of such emotions."

Keeping this definition in mind now we will try to bring out the development of ancient Greek tragedy from The Frogs.

          There has been a development in very structure of Greek tragedy. We know that playwrite Aeschylus initiated the known Greek tragedy, as P.W. Buckham states,

"Aeschylus is to be considered as the creator of Tragedy: in full panoply she sprung from his head, like Pallas from the head of Jupiter.”

Etymologically the origin of “tragedy” is Greek tragōidiā  or  "goat song" from tragos = "goat" and aeidein = "to sing". It apparently started with the singing of a choral lyric (called the dithyramb) in honor of Dionysus by a group of men wearing masks and dressing in goat-skins. Eventually, the content of the dithyramb was widened to any mythological or heroic story, and an actor or hypokrites meaning "answerer."  was introduced to answer questions posed by the choral group. Aeschylus added a second actor to the dithyramb,(a choral lyric), and hypokrites, (an actor meaning "answerer"); and Sophocles a third. But Euripides “reshaped the formal structure of traditional Attic tragedy by showing strong female characters and intelligent slaves, and by satirizing many heroes of Greek mythology”(wikipedia).  This is expressed in Aeschylus’s attack to Euripides—

“Not only do you clutter your stage with cripples and beggers, but you allow your heroes to sing and dance like Cretans. You build your plots round unsavoury topics like insects and-”

The ancient Greek tragedy was, from the beginning, dominated by some serious purposes. According to Aeschylus, a poet should write for the individual, moral and national betterment. He looks back to the past—

“You see, from the very earliest times the really great poet has been the one who had a useful lesson to teach.” (p.194)

Such poets were Orpheus, Musaeus and Hesiod. Similarly, in the sophisticated theology of his tragedies, human transgressions are punished by divine power, and humans learn from this suffering, so that it serves a positive, moral purpose. Another purpose of Aeschylus is to create courage, patriotism and glory in the reader or audience so that they want “to go straight off and slay the foe”. His heroes are “real heroes, breathing spears and lances, white-plumed helmets, breastplates and greaves; heroes with hears of good solid ox-leather, seven hides thick”(p.195). However, the activities of Aeschylus’ characters are censured for the same purposes. While Euripides focused on the realism of his characters.; for example, Euripides’ Medea is a realistic woman with recognizable emotions, and has a developed personality with many different facets to her character - she is not simply a villain. Euripides in the The Frogs argues about his writing—

“I wrote about familiar things, things the audience knew about, and could take me up on if necessary.”(p.192)

For this reason, Euripides has been often compared to Rousseau in being too modern for his time. However, Euripides has also opposed to Sophocles. According to Aristotle, Euripides’ contemporary Sophocles said that he portrayed men as they ought to be, and Euripides portrayed them as they were.   

         

             

          Euripides has developed the language of Greek tragedy used by Aeschylus and Sophocles. According to Aristotle tragedy contains serious implications and the language should also be serious and suitable to different parts of the play. Aeschylus, in The Frogs, says that “noble themes and noble sentiments must be couched in suitably dignified language” and condemns Euripides, for he has “distorted the whole thing”. While Euripides, as he says, received the events and characters from Aeschylus, but the language was like “fatty degeneration of the Art. All swollen up with high-falutin’ diction.” So he

“soon got her weight down, though; put her on a diet of particles, with a little finely chopped logic (taken peripatetically), and a special decoction of dialectic, cooked up from books and stained to facilitate digestion”.(p.191)

Actually later in the 4th century BC, the dramas of Euripides became the most popular, largely because of the simplicity of the language of his plays, though he was the least honoured of the three in his lifetime because he refused to cater to the fancies of the judges.

          The Chorus is an important part of Greek tragedy . The Chorus got space in Aeschylus far more than in any of Sophocles and Euripides. Though he has characters, they are not so active in his play. Therefore Euripides excuses Aeschylus—

“Then the Chorus would rattle off a string of odes—four of them, one after the other: still not a syllable from the muffled figure.”(p.190)

Euripedes further charges Aeschylus that eventually after a lot more of nonsensical chorul songs, about half-way through the play we get a speech from character which nobody has heard, that is, his speech is not at all common to the audience. On the contrary, Europedes reduces the Chorus to characters and humanizes them :

“Then again as soon as the play began I had everyone hard at work: no one standing idle. Women and slaves, master, young maiden, aged crone—they all talked.”(p.191)

          Now we conclude the essay by asserting that from the beginning of the Greek tragedy by Aeschylus, it experienced many changes. After Sophocles, Euripedes brought about many changes in the stage planning, character, Chorus, language, and technical aspects. He far more humanized the characters in his play. He experimented with the characterization of Media in an unconventional way.