The Language of Criticism in Aristophanes’ Frogs

Abstract

Frogs is a comedy which we can enjoy for its own sake, but it is also a document from which we can infer Athenian attitudes to tragedy. But when we speak of ‘Athenian’ attitudes, we are bringing together under a single rubric the ordinary member of the audience, the connoisseurs of poetry, the established conventional standpoint of comedy, the views of Aristophanes himself as an individual, and possibly also an intellectual treatment of tragedy which could reasonably be called ‘sophistic’. The general tendency in our own time has been to elevate the intellectual element. Pohlenz¹ went so far as to suggest that a treatise by Gorgias, comparing Aeschylus and Euripides, was a source exploited by Aristophanes for the contest in Frogs. Radermacher, Denniston and Taillardat², drawing attention to coincidences between terms used by Aristophanes in the criticism of poetry and those used by later literary critics, postulated a ‘technical’ language of criticism which took shape before the end of the fifth century B.C. and endured thereafter³. I would argue that the concept ‘technical’ has been used with insufficient rigour, and that the contribution of the sophists has been overrated. The sources of the terms in which Aristophanes presents the contest are much more varied than has commonly been allowed.