Several other poets made major contributions to tragic theater in the second half of the fifth century, but their contributions cannot be assessed in any detail. Some of their plays continued to be read for centuries (and there is a scattering of evidence for performances), but all were sooner or later eclipsed by the prestige of the three classic tragedians; only circumstantial facts and a handful of fragments remain. Of the hundred plays of Philocles, winner against the production of Sophocles that included Oedipus the King, we have eight titles and a single incomplete line. Ion of Chios is better represented, and there is interesting information about his contacts with Athenian politicians and poets and his literary versatility, but nothing that bears on his dramatic technique or his handling of myths. Some insight may come from the fragments of a Medea attributed to Neophron of Sicyon (a prolific contemporary of Euripides whose work is otherwise totally lost). Scholars in Aristotle’s school saw similarities between this play and Euripides’ Medea, and inferred that Neophron had anticipated Euripides in bringing Aegeus to Corinth (fr. 1), and in making Medea address her thumos in a monologue, torn between vengeance and love for her children (fr. 2). But the similarities are so strong that some scholars think the text in question must have been a later imitation of Euripides’ play, wrongly identified as Neophron’s.
Equally problematic is the work of Plato’s relative Critias, who was killed in the democratic counterrevolution of 403. Critias probably composed a satyr-play Sisyphus, source of a much-quoted speech of Sisyphus describing the gods as a human invention (fr. 19: see Allan, chapter 5 in this volume), and this play became confused with the Sisyphus that Euripides produced with his Trojan trilogy in 415. There was also some confusion over the tragedies Tennes, Rhadamanthys, and Pirithous, commonly attributed to Euripides but flagged by the Alexandrian Life of Euripides as inauthentic; Athenaeus at one point attributes Pirithous to ‘‘either Critias or Euripides.’’ Many scholars have accepted Wilamowitz’s inference that Critias composed Tennes, Rhadamanthys, Pirithous, and Sisyphus together as a tetralogy, but the inference is not compelling (as Collard 1995 shows); the basis of the Alexandrian judgment is unknown, and only Athenaeus’ ambivalent comment on Pirithous links Critias with any of the questioned plays. Pirithous dramatized the rescue of Theseus and Pirithous from the underworld by Heracles, who after conquering Cerberus negotiated Pirithous’ release from the rock to which he was immovably fastened for attempting (with Theseus) to abduct Persephone. A brief ancient summary quotes a dialogue in which Heracles explains himself to the underworld official Aeacus; book-fragments give parts of a mystical hymn sung by the entering chorus (probably devotees of Persephone), and a papyrus gives parts of dialogues in which Heracles meets Pirithous and learns of his predicament, and declines Theseus’ offer of help in his fight with Cerberus. The play is thus of interest for its place in the tradition of poetry about descents to the underworld (including Aristophanes’ Frogs, which might possibly have used material from it in Dionysus’ descent); but the questions of authorship and date remain undecidable.
Another late fifth-century figure, Agathon, appears in his brief career as an innovative successor of Euripides. His successful first production at the Lenaea of 416 is celebrated in Plato’s Symposium, and remarks in the Symposium and Aristophanes’ Frogs show that he left Athens for the Macedonian court in 407 or 406, where he probably died a few years later. The general character of his work can be inferred from his speech praising Eros in the Symposium, from the opening scene of Aristophanes’ Women at the Thesmophoria (where Euripides tries to get the effeminate Agathon to defend him against the complaints of the women of Athens), and from comments in Aristotle’s Poetics on his use of episodic dramatic structure and choral songs unrelated to the plot (embolima), and on the play Anthos (or perhaps Antheus), which had a wholly fictitious plot and characters. Agathon followed Euripides in his commitment to verbal dexterity and the antithetical rhetorical style promoted by Gorgias (which several of the thirty brief fragments from his plays illustrate), and to the elaborate New Music which cultural conservatives found offensive (in Women at the Thesmo-phoria Agathon sings a slightly bizarre hymn to Apollo, Artemis, and Leto, on which Euripides’ companion comments, in Jeffrey Henderson’s translation [1998-2002], ‘‘What a pretty song! How feministic and tongue-gagged and deep-kissed!’’). Thus Agathon appears to have progressed beyond Euripides in experimenting with an imaginative, aesthetically refined, and musically innovative form of tragedy. But beyond these generalities nothing is known about the substance of any of his plays.
World History
