ABSTRACT
Why, on his famous trip to the underworld in Aristophanes' Frogs, does Dionysus disguise himself as Heracles? Throughout the play, Dionysus presents a ridiculous spectacle, for he has combined the costume that marks his own identity, the effeminate yellow robe and tragic buskins, with a costume that marks the identity of the heroic Heracles, the lionskin and club. The sight is so ludicrous that Heracles cannot keep from laughing at it, and the contrast of the cowardly and weak Dionysus and his disguise as Heracles must have provided a running sight gag for the audience throughout the play. What motivates this disguise? A number of scholars, starting with Segal (1961) and most recently Lada-Richards (1999), have seenDionysus' disguise as symbolic of a loss of his own identity:Dionysus is not himself, so he tries to be Heracles. Gradually, they argue, by an initiatory journey through the underworld, Dionysus sheds this identity of Heracles and wins a sense of his own true identity. These commentators explain Dionysus' achievement of a new identity through the familiar pattern of the initiation ritual, with its threepart rite of passage: separation, liminality, reaggregation. Dionysus' disguise represents his confusion about his old identity, an identity that is replaced by a new, more mature and authentic identity by the end of the play. Dionysus' newmaturity allows him to be a fit judge of the poetic contest at the endof the play, thus resolving the concerns of scholars who see a radical discrepancy between the buffoonery of the first half of the play and the serious issues of the final poetic competition. As Segal puts it: `` The central problem in the character ofDionysus is how the rather timorous and almost despicable figure of the first part of the play can serve as an arbiter in a contest of the gravest consequences at its end. Yet by the endof the parabasis,Dionysus has attained a certain dignity, and there is no question of his fitness.''1
