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Alcibiades
One of the great Greek tragic playwrights, Sophocles died around 405 or 406 B.C.E., around the same time as Euripides. For decades, he was the most celebrated playwright of Athens. Sophocles doesn’t appear as a character in The Frogs, but he’s mentioned in passing. At the end of the play, Aeschylus asks Pluto to have Sophocles look after Aeschylus’s chair in the great hall while he (Aeschylus) travels back to the land of the living with Dionysus.
Sophocles Quotes in The Frogs
The The Frogs quotes below are all either spoken by Sophocles or refer to Sophocles. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Act 1, Scene 1 Quotes
XANTHIAS Do you mean to say that I’ve been lugging these props around but I’m not allowed to use them to get a laugh? That’s what usually happens. Phrynichus, Lycis, Ameipsias – all the popular playwrights do it. The comic porter scene. There’s one in every comedy.
DIONYSUS Not in this one. Every time I go to a show and have to sit through one of those scintillating routines, I come away more than a year older.
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DIONYSUS I need a poet who can really write. Nowadays it seems like ‘many are gone, and those that live are bad’.
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Act 1, Scene 2 Quotes
CHORUS-LEADER
We chorus folk two privileges prize:
To amuse you, citizens, and to advise.
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Sophocles Character Timeline in The Frogs
The timeline below shows where the character Sophocles appears in The Frogs. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Act 2, Scene 1
Xanthias asks if Sophocles is also competing for the chair. Pluto’s slave explains that when Sophocles first arrived, he...
(full context)
...tells them to return to Athens and “Educate the fools.” Aeschylus asks Pluto to have Sophocles keep his chair away from Euripides while he’s away. The Chorus escorts Aeschylus to Athens,...
(full context)
