Eupolis. Classical literary criticism placed Aristophanes somewhere between the harshness of Cratinus and the smoothness of Eupolis. All the Old Comedy writers worked within a highly structured format – parados, agon, and parabasis – which paradoxically offered maximum scope for improvisatory flights of fancy. Song, dance, costume, and chorus all played important roles, as did the parody of the ‘senior’ drama, tragedy. Possibly due to the influence of tragedy was the important role of a heroic figure in Aristophanic comedy: as Northrop Frye put it, “In Aristophanes there is usually a central figure who constructs his (or her) own society in the teeth of strong opposition”. The diminished role of the protagonist (and chorus) in his latest works marks a point of transition to the Middle comedy. The trend from Old Comedy to New Comedy saw a move away from highly topical concerns with real individuals and local issues towards generalized situations and stock characters. This was partly due to the internationalization of cultural perspectives during and after the Peloponnesian War. For ancient commentators such as Plutarch, New Comedy was a more sophisticated form of drama than Old Comedy. However, Old Comedy was in fact a complex and sophisticated dramatic form incorporating many approaches to humour and entertainment. In Aristophanes' early plays, the genre appears to have developed around a complex set of dramatic conventions, and these were only gradually simplified and abandoned. The City Dionysia and the Lenaia were celebrated in honour of Dionysus, the god of wine and ecstasy. (Euripides' play The Bacchae offers the best insight into fifth century ideas about this god.) Old Comedy can be understood as a celebration of the exuberant sense of release inherent in his worship. It was more interested in finding targets for satire than in any kind of advocacy. During the City Dionysia, a statue of the god was brought to the theatre from a temple outside the city, and it remained in the theatre throughout the festival, overseeing the plays like a privileged member of the audience. In The Frogs, the god appears also as a dramatic character, and he enters the theatre ludicrously disguised as Hercules. He observes to the audience that every time he is on hand to hear a joke from a comic dramatist like Phrynichus (one of Aristophanes' rivals) he ages by more than a year. This scene opens the play, and it is a