How The Frogs drew on Medea

The Frogs sends Dionysus to the underworld to judge a contest between the long-dead Aeschylus and the freshly-dead Euripides for the throne of tragedy. Aristophanes parodies Euripides without mercy — the fussy prologues, the talky realism, the boundary-pushing voice behind heroines like Medea. Euripides loses to Aeschylus, but the joke only lands because the audience could recite Medea from memory.

A generation after Euripides put a child-killing mother at the center of Medea and dared the audience to sympathize with her, Aristophanes dragged him down to Hades in The Frogs and put his whole style on trial — the streetwise characters, the clever talk, the gods cut down to human size. Euripides loses the contest to Aeschylus. But you only bother parodying a writer the whole city already knows by heart.