Dionysus' unexpected decision at the end of the play is generally thought to reflect the notion that poets such as Aeschylus and Euripides had practical moral insight to offer their audiences and to promote an "Aeschylean" over a "Euripidean" approach to life. I argue, however, that this ending offers a curiously offbeat combination of aesthetic insight and intertextual playfulness that ultimately relieves the Aristophanic Aeschylus and Euripides of the moralizing burden they have had to shoulder for so long. My reasons for suggesting this arise from consideration of the relationship between Frogs and another literary text that featured a high-profile poetic contest, namely,
Hipponax fr. 48 Dg. has been understood in the past as a statement of the poet's poverty and hunger. 1 More recently, however, scholars have pointed out the humor and ambiguity of the fragment, noting in particular the mock-heroic diction of the first two lines and the bathos that results when this sort of diction is applied to such an apparently trivial subject as one's own hunger. 2
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