Aristophanes' Frogs by Mark Griffith;

Author:Mark Griffith;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: OUP Premium
Published: 2013-05-14T16:00:00+00:00

Figure 5–1. Two examples of Dionysian music, as represented in Athenian vase-painting of the fifth century.

(a) Dionysus plays a barbitos (lyre) while two satyrs dance and play krotala (castanets).

Interior of Red-figure kylix-cup by the Brygos Painter, ca. 480 BCE (ARV2 371,14: Cab. Méd. Inv. 575). Drawing by Elizabeth Wahle.

Figure 5–1. (b) A young man plays the auloi (double-pipes), presumably at a symposium, while a woman dances with krotala (castanets).

Red-figure Athenian kylix-cup by Epictetus (ARV2 72,16), ca. 500 BCE (London E38, 1843,1103.9). Photo courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum.

But whichever interpretation we give to this line, and whether we take the Muse to be old or young, attractive or hideous, it is in any case crucial that she is female. The notion of the “art” of tragedy, or a “Muse,” or “Music” itself, being a feminine companion or sexual plaything of the male poet, thus both a source of his inspiration and the object of his control—possibly even a sex object to be pandered to others—runs deep in this play, and is a recurrent theme in Greek (and Roman) culture at large. (It was clearly a major theme also of Cratinus’ Pytinê [421 BCE]; see chapter 1.) By contrast, no comments or innuendoes are made in Frogs about Aeschylus’ wife or family (or any mistress): the legitimacy of his Athenianness and of his poetry is taken for granted. The notion that Euripides had a ménage à trois with his composer, Cephisophon, consorted with a foreign dancing-Muse, and presented whorish heroines on the stage in his tragedies calls into question both his moral and his political respectability, just as such accusations do in the case of (allegedly) foreign-born populist politicians such as Cleophon (680–82). This happens again at the end of the song of the “Muse,” as Aeschylus points to the “foot” or “leg” (1322–23 poda) of the dancing Muse, and scoffs at Euripides, “When you are composing/making (poiôn) stuff like that,/ do you have the nerve to find fault with my songs/limbs (melê),/ as you make your songs/ move your limbs (melopoiôn) in (or “with”) the Twelve Tricks of Cyrene?” Cyrene was the name of a famous, expensive courtesan in late fifth-century Athens, whose beauty and “moves/tricks” were frequently alluded to by Aristophanes and others. (Cyrene was also the name of a Greek city in Libya, exotic and wealthy.)

In a similar comic turn, Aristophanes’ contemporary and rival, Pherecrates, in his Cheiron (fr. 155, a substantial fragment of which survives in quotation), had introduced Music (Mousikê) as a character onstage who complains that she has been sexually molested by a series of leading practitioners of the New Music. She refers first to the fast-and-loose switching back and forth of lyric modes by the dithyrambist Cinesias, as he “composed ill-tuned bendings in his strophes … so that you couldn’t tell his left from his right,” and then Phrynes “bending and twisting … with twelve tunings (harmonias) on five strings,” and finally Timotheus, who “completely ruined [her] with his twelve strings”—a striking

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