Cover of The Frogs by Aristophanes Ebook The Frogs
Ebook · Sovereign

The Frogs

Author
Aristophanes
Series
Greek Comedy
Language
English
Length
84 pages
ISBN
9781911535836
Published
10 November 2016
Imprint
Sovereign
  • comedy
  • satire
  • ancient Greece
  • theater
  • tragedy
  • literature
  • underworld
  • Dionysus
  • Aeschylus
  • Euripides

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Description

Dionysus to the underworld, dressed as Heracles, to fetch a tragedian who might save the city. Aristophanes’ Frogs is a croaking chorus, a poetry contest, and Athens laughing at its own taste. Comedy as civic medicine. Xanthias as the saner slave; Aeschylus and Euripides weighing lines like cheese. The frogs croak ‘brekekekex’. Under the slapstick, a city asking which poet it deserves. Brekekekex: two dead tragedians weighed like cheese for a city that needs a poet.

Author

Aristophanes was a comic playwright of ancient Athens. Eleven of his forty plays survive virtually complete. These, together with fragments of some of his other plays, provide the only real examples of a genre of comic drama known as Old Comedy, and are used to define it. Also known as the Father of Comedy and the Prince of Ancient Comedy, Aristophanes has been said to recreate the life of ancient Athens more convincingly than any other author.

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