Dionysus ' unexpected decision at the end of Aristophanes ' « Frogs » (1466ff.) is generally thought to reveal the notion that poets such as Aeschylus and Euripides had practical moral advice to offer their audiences and to promote an « Aeschylean » over a « Euripidean » approach to life.
However, consideration of the relationship between « Frogs » and the « Contest of Homer and Hesiod », another text that featured a high-profile poetic contest, suggests that this ending offers a combination of aesthetic insight and intertextual playfulness that ultimately relieves the Aristophanic Aeschylus and Euripides of this moralizing burden.
