Critias’ Pirithous and Aristophanes’ Frogs. Metatheatrical Echoes and the Critical Debate

In his commentary on lines 464 ff. of Frogs, the Scholiast refers five times to Euripides’ Theseus, the play said to be parodied in the comedy. Wilamowitz was the most vocal opponent of the validity of this connection. In his initial refutation, published in Analecta Euripidea in 1875, he argued that the Scholiast had identified only a verbal similarity between the two texts despite significant differences in theme and chronology. According to Wilamowitz, the real object of parody in Frogs was another tragedy: Pirithous. Furthermore, in the same essay, Wilamowitz himself strongly argues for attributing authorship of Pirithous to Critias, and not to Euripides – a notion that still divides critics. This article summarises the arguments of leading contemporary scholars seeking to confirm or refute Wilamowitz’s hypothesis concerning the authorship of the tragedy and the idea that Aristophanes staged a tragic parody of Pirithous by Critias. Regarding the metatheatrical dimension of the 5th Century BCE, the paper proposes that the similarities and assonances between Frogs and Pirithous, acknowledged by critics in the passage from Frogs 464 ff. (the encounters between Heracles and Aeacus, and between Dionysus and the guardian of the Underworld), could extend much further than previously recognised, encompassing thematic and dramatic recurrences, textual parody, and references to the political situation at the time. Rather than considering the initial act of Frogs as a generic parody of the myth of Heracles’ descent into the Underworld, it is concluded that bearing in mind the plot of Pirithous and attributing the tragedy to Critias, the reading of Frogs becomes much more brilliant and meaningful. At the same time, the comedy appears more imbued with the tragic atmosphere of the stasis that shook the polis, when the coup d'état of the Thirty Tyrants was imminent.