The Frogs, with its ample wit and satire, has much in common with other comedies by Aristophanes.
Acharnians, the earliest of Aristophanes’s surviving comedies, is a work of satire against pro-war politicians.
Wasps (422 B.C.E.), Aristophanes’s fourth surviving play, satirizes Cleon, an Athenian general in the Peloponnesian War. Aristophanes wrote
Lysistrata (first performed in 411 B.C.E.) after a coup overthrew Athens’s democratic government and briefly replaced it with an oligarchy. The comedy follows a woman, Lysistrata, who sets out to end the Peloponnesian War by convincing all the women of the land to withhold sex from men in an attempt to get the warring men to declare peace. In
The Frogs, during Euripides and Aeschylus’s competition in Hades, each poet references several of their rival’s and their own plays. Aeschylus cites his
Seven Against Thebes as an example of a play that inspired Athenians to go to war.
Seven Against Thebes was produced in 468 or 467 B.C.E. and follows Oedipus’s son Polynices’s efforts to take Thebes from his brother Eteocles. The brothers face each other in a dual at the end of the play, and both die. In
The Frogs, as Aeschylus praises his own plays for their noble themes and heroic characters, he criticizes Euripides’s plays for their lurid subject matters and unnoble characters. He alludes to Euripides’s
Hippolytus (428 B.C.E.), which is about Phaedra, a married woman who falls in love with her stepson Hippolytus and makes false accusations against him when he rejects her.