Aristophanes’ “Oresteia”: An Unnoticed Silence in the Frogs

Halfway through Aristophanes’ Frogs (830), Dionysus re-emerges on stage accompanying the two tragic poets, Aeschylus and Euripides, but also (as most scholars surmise) Pluto, the god of the Underworld, at whose initiative and under whose aegis the upcoming contest is to be held (784–785). [1] Aeschylus initially refrains from speaking, but his supercilious silence, noted by both Dionysus and Euripides (832–834; cf. 911–920), lasts for only ten lines (830–839). Ιt is certainly significant, chiefly because it illustrates in miniature the well-known silence of Aeschylean figures. [2] Yet it has also diverted the critics’ attention from Pluto. This seemingly secondary character remains silent much longer, almost through the entire agon, until (six hundred lines later) his unsolicited and unforeseen intervention at 1414 shakes Dionysus out of his paralyzing inability to reach a decision and dispenses authoritative advice: [3]

With these lines, Pluto has found his voice and takes the lead in bringing about the denouement of the play. A little later he nudges Dionysus to reach a decision (1466), he invites the god and Aeschylus to a feast (1479–1480), and finally he sings his farewell as the poet is escorted back to Athens.

I find it surprising that Pluto’s extraordinary silence, lasting for over one third of the comedy, has been neglected for so long, and I believe it is high time it emerged from the shadow cast by the towering figure of Aeschylus. In order to shed light on it and make a case for its significance, I wish to argue that Aristophanes’ treatment of Pluto becomes the focus of a sophisticated paratragic play with Pylades in the Choephori. First, and most obviously, Aeschylus’ victory is foreshadowed by Aristophanes’ adaptation of an Aeschylean dramatic technique, through which the comic poet intimates a certain affinity with his tragic predecessor. What is more, that intertextual allusion momentarily assimilates Aristophanes’ Dionysus to Aeschylus’ Orestes, so that the god’s eventual choice of Aeschylus suggests a gendered understanding of poetic creativity and proposes a masculine model for it. Finally, Aristophanes formulates what might be called “a poetics of silence” that applies equally, yet differently, to both tragedy and comedy.

Let us first recall the moment where Pylades breaks his silence in Choephori 900–902, as it constitutes a central intertext:

Among the handful of critics who have paid any attention to Pluto’s silence, only a couple have correlated its unexpected breaking with the words of Pylades. [4] Alan Sommerstein, for instance, simply notes (1997:229 ad 830) that Pluto’s sudden utterance at 1414 “may be almost as effective a surprise as the three-line speech of Pylades” (italics mine). By alerting us to the analogy of dramatic effect, he points in the right direction, but does not go as far as Niall Slater, who, ever sensitive to nuances of performance, also stresses the similarity of the tragic and the comic surprise and wonders whether this is “deliberately and deeply ironically so,” given the following:

This may be true enough, but Aeschylus’ victory is yet to come, so any irony, I suspect, would not be perceived by the audience. Yet, the deliberate allusion to the Choephori, which Slater notes, has important implications extending well beyond this passage.

What do Pluto and Pylades have in common? We may begin with stagecraft. In his study of Aeschylean silences, Oliver Taplin (1972:79–80) distinguishes Aeschylus’ use of silent characters such as Niobe and Achilles at the opening of tragedies (which the Aristophanic Euripides criticizes in Frogs 911–920) from silences that are significant only in their breaking, as is the case of Pylades in Choephori 900. But while Euripides’ criticism of Aeschylus does not, strictly speaking, apply to Pylades, it nevertheless sheds light on the perspective of the Athenian audience, who would be intent on figuring out when or even whether —as in Pylades’ case— a silence might be broken. [6] The difference between “when” and “whether” is in fact crucial, since with Pylades we are given no indication at all that he might speak, although several characters acknowledge his presence, on or off stage (20, 208, 561–562, 713, 741, 839–841, 848). Unlike, say, Cassandra’s silent presence in the Agamemnon, which elicits comments from both the chorus and Clytaemestra (1035–1067), no one in the Choephori takes note of Pylades’ silence or speculates as to its cause. Such attention would give the game away; on the basis of its absence, the spectators have every reason to believe that Pylades, who seems to operate as Orestes’ shadow, is a mute extra. [7] In fact, I can think of no other character, tragic or comic, who spends so much time on stage in a silence that is not commented on and then speaks —in other words, who is presumed for a long time to be a mute extra (κωφὸν πρόσωπον) but turns out not to be—except, that is, Pluto in the Frogs. [8] Pluto’s unobtrusive presence must lead the spectators, if they even bother to think about it at all, to the conclusion that he is a muta persona. The three verses that suddenly shatter Pluto’s silence, therefore, must recall the Aeschylean precedent, which is the only available parallel in all extant drama.

The analogy between Pluto and Pylades is reinforced if, as is most likely, both are played by the “last actor” available in each dramatic genre, i.e. the fourth for comedy and the third for tragedy. In the case of the Frogs, according to the ancient scholia, Apollonius defended the view that lines 1414–1416 were spoken not by the chorus but by Pluto played by the fourth actor. [9] In the case of the Choephori, I follow the scholia in assigning Pylades’ words at lines 900–902 to the third actor, so that the Servant exits at 887 and Pylades enters with Orestes at 892. [10] In other words, both Pylades and Pluto must have been assumed by the audiences of their respective plays to be mute extras by the time of their first utterance.

While neither Pylades nor Pluto breaks his silence with the ox-like bombastic words of a Niobe or an Achilles (Frogs 924–926), their sudden interventions are equally and similarly momentous. In ending their silence, both characters bring about the resolution of an impasse and urge the protagonist to action. At this moment of indecision in the agon of the Frogs, Dionysus interrupts Aeschylus to state that he is stuck, to the extent that we cannot even tell who τὸν μέν and τῷ δέ (1413) refer to. In “considering one of them to be clever and taking pleasure in the other,” he cannot distinguish between the two any more than we can. By refusing to judge, in effect he threatens to break off the contest (οὐ κρινῶ, 1411), thus ending his trip in futility. It is at this point that Pluto intervenes, with the result that Dionysus re-considers the contest, although he is not relieved of his ambivalence (δυσκρίτως γ᾽ ἔχω, 1433) until later, when he declares: “I have judged Aeschylus to be the the winner” (ἔκρινα νικᾶν Αἰσχύλον, 1473). [11] A comparable situation, even at the lexical level, is found in the Choephori, where Orestes responds instantly to Pylades’ intervention with the telling “I am judging you to be the winner” (κρίνω σε νικᾶν, 903). This is a pivotal moment not only in this play, but in the entire tragic trilogy; [12] the phrasing of the passage reveals that here also we have to do with a contest, not between two poets, to be sure, but between two conflicting principles of equal strength, pitting obedience to the Delphic oracle against the bonds of motherhood. [13]

I shall return to those dilemmas, but let me first point out that, by having Pluto play a Pylades-like role, Aristophanes demonstrates his acuteness as a reader of Aeschylus in yet another way. The god of the Underworld in the Frogs turns out to be homologous to a character whose name could be playfully etymologized as “Gate of Hades” (<πύλη + ᾋδης). Such etymologizing should not surprise us, as it is not unlike what we find, for instance, in Plato’s Cratylus. It is significant here in light of the mythological background or even the antecedents of the Aeschylean version. As Garvie (1970, 1986) has suggested, Pylades, son of Strophios, looks like an instantiation of Hermes, primarily in his associations with the Underworld. These chthonic aspects pervade the Choephori, starting with the play’s opening, quoted verbatim in Frogs 1126–1128. [14] It is not necessary to repeat Garvie’s arguments; suffice it to note that Hermes’ titles include Pylios, Pylaios, Propylaios, Pyledokos, Stropheus, and Strophaios. Thus, when Aristophanes substitutes Pluto for Pylades, he may also reveal the underlying layers of Aeschylus’ version. In this light, moreover, Dionysus’ invocation of Zeus soter (“saviour”) (1433), echoing the very words with which Aeacus opens the second half of the Frogs after the parabasis (738), is more than a generic phrase, especially given the play’s emphasis on the salvation of the polis (1419, 1436). This title of Zeus as the recipient of the third libation, which expresses his chthonic aspects, is transferred to Hermes for the first time at Choephori 1–2. [15] Even Dionysus’ eventual oath-breaking (1471; cf. 101–102), while it constitutes ‒ in Slater’s view‒ an ironic inversion of Pylades’ appeal to “faithful oaths” (πιστά τ᾽ εὐορκώματα, 901), is in keeping with Hermes’ functions. It is reminiscent, for example, of the gift of deceptive oath-swearing, said to be bestowed by Hermes upon Autolycus (κλεπτοσύνῃ θ᾽ ὅρκῳ τε, Odyssey 19.396). [16] It has been suggested (Garvie 1986:xiv–xv) that Aeschylus drew on an earlier version of the myth featuring Hermes as Orestes’ guide; regardless of that, Aristophanes’ decision to model his own scene on the Choephori shows his profound understanding of the mythological underpinnings of the Aeschylean account.

Is it fair to expect the spectators of the Frogs to pick up such subtleties? How readily could they recognize in the breaking of Pluto’s silence the allusion to a moment, however significant and memorable, of a tragedy originally produced half a century earlier? I believe we should credit the Aristophanic audience with a high degree of sophistication, evident not only in the chorus’ confidence that the spectators can understand the jokes because “each one has a book” (1114), but also in the rich texture of Aristophanes’ plays in general. [17] Yet, the transparency of the paratragic allusion has as much to do with Aeschylus’ claim that his poetry did not die with him (ὅτι ἡ ποίησις οὐ συντέθνηκέ μοι, 868). This of course needs to be properly understood in the context of the reperformance of Aeschylean and other drama starting in the fifth century. The particulars and even the historicity of the Athenian decree that uniquely allowed the posthumous reperformance of Aeschylus’ tragedies may be in doubt: could Aeschylus’ plays be selected as official entries for the dramatic competition of the City Dionysia or the Lenaia? Were they simply restaged in deme festivals? [18] But whatever the form, occasion, and circumstances of the revivals of Aeschylean drama, it is not unreasonable to assume that, partly through those revivals, the audience was familiar with the details of the Choephori. [19] The very agon of the Frogs, after all, which depends for its full reception on such familiarity with the verbal and visual details of the Aeschylean corpus, produces a comparison between the Aeschylean and Euripidean tropes, whose effect would be all the sharper if it replicated an actual juxtaposition of the two poets in the context of the dramatic festival. [20]

If Pluto is then meant to recall Pylades, the intertextual allusion has wide-ranging implications. First, and most obviously, Aristophanes turns the tables on Euripides, whose criticism of the Choephori he implicitly rejects. Apart from the possible underlying connections that bind Hermes, Pylades, and Pluto together, the mere paratragic use of a memorable and central moment from the Choephori rebuffs Euripides’ attack on that play’s opening and reverses its effects. In addition, by relying on an Aeschylean dramatic technique, Aristophanes implicitly dismisses yet another part of Euripides’ case against Aeschylus: his use of silent characters (911–926). [21] Thus, the intervention of Pluto, one might say, kills two Euripidean birds with one “Aeschylean” stone and anticipates the older dramatist’s victory.

We can appreciate even further this intimation of a critical preference for Aeschylus over Euripides, if we place Pluto’s silence and its allusion to the Oresteia in a somewhat broader context. Three years before the production of the Frogs, Euripides staged his Orestes, a production unmistakably evoked in Frogs 303–304. [22] In this Euripidean version Pylades is loquacious ever since his first appearance (729), until he is asked to talk (1591) but remains silent (1592), as Euripides has now transferred his role to a non-speaking actor, so that Apollo can appear as deus ex machina (1625). But Euripides’ handling of the shift goes beyond mere dramatic necessity. Frank Nisetich has convincingly interpreted the sudden silencing of Pylades in Orestes as a complete inversion of the Choephori, yet to similar effect: in both tragedians the voice of Pylades modulates into the utterances of Apollo, who speaks through Pylades in the Choephori, but instead of Pylades in the Orestes. [23] I would complement Nisetich’s analysis by adding that Aristophanes, three years after the Orestes, reverts to the Choephori model, where Pylades unexpectedly bursts into speech, in a pointed gesture of favoring the Aeschylean version over the Euripidean subversion. The tacit dismissal of the recent Orestes in the Frogs underlines even more boldly Aeschylus’ victory. [24]

Aeschylus’ victory may be earned through the Choephori, but it will be celebrated by way of the Eumenides. The procession that, at Pluto’s behest, escorts Aeschylus to Athens by the light of torches (φαίνετε τοίνυν ὑμεῖς τούτῳ λαμπάδας ἱεράς, χἄμα προπέμπετε, Frogs 1524–1525) is not unique in the Frogs; it is paralleled, for instance, by the torch-lit celebrations that seal the Lysistrata (1217) and the Plutus (1194). But, as has been noted, the conclusion of the Frogs reprises closely the end of the Eumenides, where the Erinyes are taken to their shrine in Athens “by the sacred light of these escorts” (πρὸς φῶς ἱερῶν τῶνδε προπομπῶν, Eumenides 1005). Further, the comic chorus’ invitation to the chthonic gods to provide the polis with “good counsels for great goods” (μεγάλων ἀγαθῶν ἀγαθὰς ἐπινοίας, Frogs 1529–1530) seems to be adapted from Athena’s wish that, with the help of the new chthonic residents of Athens, the citizens may have “a good mind for good things” (εἴη δ᾽ ἀγαθῶν ἀγαθὴ διάνοια πολίταις, Eumenides 1012–1013). [25] Such verbal echoes probably combine with visual effects to reinforce the analogy. Grim and menacing at times (Frogs 835–839, 847–848), Aeschylus returns from the Underworld to benefit the city, just as the Erinyes, terrifying chthonic deities which become benevolent, are tamed and incorporated in Athens. [26] By using a device from the repertoire of Aeschylus’ art to foreshadow his victory, Aristophanes succeeds at the same time in fashioning his own play after the Oresteia.

The progression from the Choephori to the Eumenides reveals yet another aspect of Aeschylus’ victory. The patterning of Pluto on Pylades transforms, ipso facto, Dionysus into an Orestes of sorts, who —as Euripides is made to remind us in his criticism of the Choephori— enters a dangerous realm under cover to reclaim what is his own. This is not unlike the descent of the comic Dionysus, who first disguises himself (108–115) and then swaps identities with his slave twice (494–497; 579–588) in his attempt to resurrect a tragic poet. [27] Moreover, the god’s moment of indecision, as we saw, is comparable to Orestes’ impasse, at least in terms of intensity, as both characters need to avoid incurring the enmity of someone important —a poet (Frogs 1412) or the gods (Choephori 902). But even the content of their dilemmas is worth exploring a little more. The terms of Orestes’ tragic dilemma, his need to choose between the bonds of motherhood and an oracle that enjoins loyalty to the dead father, are further clarified at Eumenides 657–666, where the issue boils down to two mutually exclusive accounts of human reproduction, centered on maternity and paternity respectively. [28] Just as the Oresteia ultimately, however problematically, vindicates the male generative power, so does Dionysus. By playing Orestes to Pluto’s Pylades, Dionysus replicates Orestes’ choice: in choosing Aeschylus, he returns in effect to his initial search for a γόνιμος ποιητής, a “fertile poet” who would produce well-born phrases (96–97); in this way, he upholds the value of male potency in the sphere of poetry. [29]

To be sure, Dionysus’ repudiation of Euripides is not as radical an act as Orestes’ matricide. Yet, it is still envisioned as rejection of the female voice or, more generally, of feminine or effeminate discourse. [30] To the silences and ox-like words of Aeschylean characters, Euripides juxtaposes his own “democratic” drama, which gives equal weight to the voices of “a woman, a slave no less than a master, a maiden, and an old woman” (949–952). By Euripides’ own admission, his drama effaces hierarchical distinctions of class and gender; what stands out in particular is the prominence of women, young and old. This emphasis on the female voice is immediately followed (ἔπειτα) by Euripides’ claim to have taught his audience to λαλεῖν “talk, chatter, babble, prattle” (954). The sequence is not accidental; that becomes clear a little later, when the nominal form of the verbal root is once again paired with the presence of women on the tragic stage: Aeschylus’ objections to the Euripidean “Phaedras” and “Stheneboeas” (1043–1051) precede (εἶτ᾽ αὖ, 1069) his accusation that his younger rival taught the audience to practice chattering and babbling (λαλιὰν ἐπιτηδεῦσαι καὶ στωμυλίαν, 1069; cf. 815), which emptied the wrestling-schools of young men.

Far from being idiosyncratic or unique to the Frogs, this use of the root λαλ-, nominal or verbal, is consonant with what we find elsewhere in the Aristophanic corpus, where it often denotes modes of speech that are female (e.g. Lysistrata 442, 356, 627; Thesmophoriazusae 393, 717; cf. Peace 539) or effeminate (e.g. Thesmophoriazusae 138, 267, 578, 1083, 1087, 1097, 1108–1109). This is not its exclusive emphasis, to be sure: in addition to women or effeminate men such as Agathon, it is also pinned on new politicians and orators, active in the Assembly or the lawcourts (Acharnians 21, 705, 716, 933; Knights 295, 1381; Peace 653; Frogs 679; Ecclesiazusae 119, 302), on sophists and the youths under their influence (Clouds 931, 1053, 1394; Frogs 1492), and on old men past their prime (Wasps 1135; Clouds 505). [31] It is not always possible to draw clearcut distinctions; yet even this is instructive, since sophistic arguments, political oratory, modern tragic discourse, idle gossip, and female chatter are all viewed as versions of inane talk that often blend into each other.

Far from being accidental, therefore, this semantic osmosis further reveals that these applications of λαλεῖν have something in common; they indeed seem to be unified by the insinuation of a lack of manliness. Unlike λέγειν, which characterizes the Athenian citizen, λαλεῖν cannot be the mode of speaking of a true man in his prime, who says what he means and means what he says. Verbal efficacy can thus be correlated with sexual potency, while ineffectual loquacity is the verbal equivalent of effeminacy and impotence, so aptly symbolized by the sterile “pissing” of the loquacious young tragedians (95). [32] In this light, although Euripides is initially sought as more fertile and “male” than his younger contemporaries, who are “more garrulous by a mile” (πλεῖν ἢ σταδίῳ λαλίστερα, 91) than him, he turns out to be virtually a “woman” by comparison to Aeschylus, exponent of the old military ethos and paragon of traditional manliness (1013–1043; cf. 1008), whose silent characters Dionysus prefers to the chatterboxes of current tragedy (νῦν οἱ λαλοῦντες, 916–917). [33] The ultimate rejection of Euripides, who is blamed for introducing feminine discourse into the city, can thus be described as Dionysus’ version of killing the mother. Forced by Pluto to play momentarily the role of Orestes, in other words, Dionysus not only repudiates the female voice, but also subscribes to the case for the (pro)creative potency of the male, and chooses the poet who puts it forth —in the Oresteia.

By thus re-enacting a crucial moment of the Oresteia and by anticipating Aeschylus’ victory, Pluto’ silence represents a refutation of Euripides’ earlier criticism of Aeschylean silences and an acceptance of Aeschylean poetics and ideology. What is more, it dovetails with what might be called the comic poetics of silence that is put forth in the Frogs. As the play opens, Dionysus’ servant Xanthias, who represents the voice or spirit of comedy, tries to insert into the comic performance some of the funny and vulgar words that Dionysus hates. [34] Dionysus’ attempt to impose a measure of silence on comedy corresponds therefore to his frustration with the chattering (λαλεῖν) of the current tragedians, which renders the tragic discourse ineffectual. Not surprisingly, the god of theater finds the silence of the Aeschylean characters of old more pleasing than the empty talk of the current tragic poets, a criticism with which Aeschylus predictably concurs (1069). Consequently, Aristophanes intimates that his own comedy and Aeschylean tragedy are aligned in their pursuit of a kind of silence. [35] They both wish to suppress what is vulgar, manifested as τὸ φορτικόν in comedy and as τὸ πονηρόν in tragedy (Frogs 1053). [36]

This convergence of comic and tragic poetics that I discern in the Frogs achieves more than a simple anticipation of Aeschylus’ victory. As Heiden 1991 has convincingly argued, Aristophanes can hardly have endorsed unequivocally a return to the times and poetics of Aeschylus. [37] Yet, the comic poet does use Aeschylean tropes in order to appropriate the vitality and substantiveness of Aeschylean poetics, so that Aeschylus’ victory is transformed into a manifesto for a renewed Aristophanic comedy. Twice in the play, in fact, the comic chorus renounces eloquence, glib rhetoric, and excessive speech (354; 1491–1499). In other words, salvation in the Frogs does not come from Aeschylus himself, but from Aristophanes’ own use of Aeschylus. Through Aeschylus’ victory, foreshadowed and expedited by the paratragic allusion to an Aeschylean silent character, the comic poet seeks to revitalize his own voice, to claim possession of effective speech, and to assert his authority in the polis.