Clashing Greeks and Victorian Culture Wars: Euripides vs. Aristophanes in Late-Victorian Discourse

Aristophanes at Oxford O.W. (1894) offers a rollicking undergraduate romp through the approximate territory of Aristophanes’s Frogs. But the work is primarily a lampoon targeting Oscar Wilde: his aestheticism, directly, and his homosexuality, more covertly. Of particular interest is the classical referencing employed by the undergraduate farceurs. That the classics would become the ground for culture war is perhaps no great surprise: the battle was fought out among the classically educated youths of Britain. The contest amounts to a struggle between preferred classics. The aesthetes waged a consistent campaign to insist on the modernity and value of Euripidean drama. Against such a campaign, within a classics-citing context, recourse to the more conservative comedy of Aristophanes provided a natural riposte.