Produced in 405 BCE, just months before Athens' disastrous loss of the Peloponnesian War, Aristophanes' Frogs is a play about how important — and ridiculous — great art can be. Featuring a poetic battle royale between the ghosts of Aeschylus and Euripides, the play blends highbrow literary satire, bawdy sight gags, and more than a little bit of reactionary xenophobia. So nothing's changed there, then.

Walk through the story with us as we wrap up our Big Fat Greek Summer of Theatre. Want to read the transcript? Click here. Thanks for listening — don't forget to leave a rating or review!

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Euripides's plays, including The Trojan Women, include a great many complex and sympathetic female characters. In this episode, we use Euripides's interest in women as a jumping-off point to look at the real lives of women in Classical Athens during the 5th century BCE, when Euripides would have been alive and writing.

Or at least, we try to. Join us on a slightly frustrating journey through the slim evidence for actual Greek women's existence, exploring childhood, marriage, funerals, and the occasional bawdy all-girls camping trip.

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Our Greek Theatre summer continues with the last of the great tragedians, Euripides (c. 480–406 BCE). While less successful than Aeschylus and Sophocles when it came to winning prizes at the Athenian Dionysia, Euripides was more popular in his day—according to the historian Thucydides, Athenian prisoners of war were able to win favors, and sometimes freedom, by reciting his lines to their captors.

He has also left us the largest body of work of any of the other tragedy writers. He is known for a more cynical outlook on religion, for his naturalistic dialogue, and as a writer of women with deep characters. This week, we look at The Trojan Women, his portrait of Hecuba and the other royal women of Troy as they wait to learn their fates following the sack of the city by the Greeks—a sequel to the events of Homer's Iliad.

Want to read a transcript of this episode? Click here. Thanks for listening, and don't forget to subscribe and leave a rating or review!

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