«Dionysus between Bacchae and Frogs»: a short history of a philological dispute, with a proposal to go beyond
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Abstract
Since the beginning of the sixties of the last century, several philologists have studied the presence of significant parallels between the representation of Dionysus offered by Euripides' Bacchae and that which is at the heart of Aristophanes' Frogs, parallels that the relative chronology of these two plays has undoubtedly helped to underline. These data have been interpreted in different ways, being most often put on the account of the myth to which the two plays refer or of the comic parody of the tragedy. I propose to reconstruct the main stages of this debate, while making my own contribution. My hypothesis is that the parallels identified by the researchers are to be understood within the framework of an inter-generic poetic rivalry between Euripides and Aristophanes. In this perspective, the fact that Dionysus is the protagonist of both plays cannot be dissociated from his function as representative of two antagonistic conceptions of theater. The latter are expressed in particular by means of transvestism in the initiatory scenarios that conclude the Bacchae and open the Frogs.
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