The Frogs

The Frogs is an ancient Greek comedy by the Athenian playwright Aristophanes, written in Ancient Greek under the title Batrachoi, known in Latin as Ranae, and first performed at the Lenaia festival in Athens in 405 BC, where it won first prize. The play follows the god Dionysus and his slave Xanthias on a journey to the underworld to bring back the recently deceased tragedian Euripides, whose death Dionysus mourns as a loss to Athenian theatre, but on arrival Dionysus instead finds himself presiding over a contest between Euripides and the older tragedian Aeschylus over which of them is the superior poet, ultimately choosing to revive Aeschylus for his more practically useful wisdom. A defining work of Old Comedy, the play combines broad, irreverent humor with sophisticated literary criticism, staging an extended formal debate between the two tragedians' contrasting styles and using the contest to comment on the political and moral state of Athens near the end of the Peloponnesian War.