Athens has run out of good poets, so the god of theatre goes down to Hades to bring one back. Brekekekex koax koax.
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Dionysus, badly disguised as Heracles, travels to the underworld with his slave Xanthias to fetch the tragedian Euripides, who has just died. He rows across a lake to the croaking of a frog chorus and meets a chorus of initiates from the mysteries of Eleusis. In Hades he ends up judging a contest between Euripides and Aeschylus. The Frogs is being pressed now and can't be read here yet. Support it and it opens on the shelf.
It won first prize at the Lenaia festival early in 405 BC, a year after Euripides and Sophocles had both died and a year before Athens lost its long war with Sparta. It was admired enough to be given a second performance, a rare honour, reportedly for the speech in which the chorus urges the city to restore the rights of disenfranchised citizens.
The two poets settle it by weighing their verses on a pair of scales, line against line, and Aeschylus wins by loading his side with a river, a chariot and a corpse. Most of the jokes are about language, each playwright parodying the other's style, which makes this a comedy almost nobody can laugh at in translation. Read word by word, you can see what each joke is aimed at.
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