Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Frogs of Aristophanes, Adapted for Performance by the Oxford University Dramatic Society, 1892: With an English Version Partly Adapted From That of J. Hookham Frere and Partly Written for the Occasion
The Frogs appeared late in the poet's career, in the year 405 b.c. Aristophanes was indeed only thirty-nine, but he had lived through a great deal He could hardly remember a time when Athens had not Keen struggling in the hopeless Peloponnesian war, spending vast sums and many lives, losing her dependencies one by one, and earning the jealousy and hatred of half the Grecian world. Like all his party, the poet had never been in sympathy with the war, and he had welcomed at last, in 421, that truce whose expediency he had so often preached in the Theatre. Then came the Sicilian expedition, the offspring of a new ambi tion for foreign dominion, which was more universal than the old antagonism to Sparta had been, and appealed to most elements in the Athenian State: therefore when the terrible crash came, all parties, and among them that of Aristophanes, felt equally the national character of the calamity which reduced Athens at one stroke from imperial power to a struggle against overwhelming odds for dear existence.
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