Frogs and Eleusis?

At 159, Xanthias says ‘I’ m the ass at the Mysteries.' The precise point of this jest is unfortunately not yet recovered, and at this stage in the play it seems to be a gratuitous remark prompted from Xanthias by Heracles' reference to the Mystae and by exasperation. So far the play has given us Dionysus, on his way to Hades to fetch back Euripides, dressed in a bizarre combination of clothes appropriate to himself and to Heracles, two dialogues in which the derelict state of comedy and tragedy has been lamented, and a description of the various ways of completing a katabasis or journey to Hades. Heracles' account of the travails on the journey to Hades culminates in the promise of the music, lights and dancing of the Mystae, the Eleusinian Initiates, but at this point we do not know what, if any, part they are to play in the drama.

The Frogs continues to generate much scholarly writing, which has not excluded discussion of its relationship to the Eleusinian Mysteries. However, much work has recently been done on these Mysteries, so that a further consideration is not entirely otiose. There have been attempts to deny a connection specifically with the Eleusinian Mysteries, and to see rather the Lesser Mysteries at Agrae, which were preparatory to the Greater, or the processions at the Lenaea.