There is only fragmentary evidence of playwrights other than the main three, so it is difficult to measure their rhetorical skills. We are told that Phrynichus (first victory 511) made the audience weep by his representation of the Capture of Miletus (after 494). It is obvious that he had the rhetorical skill to move an audience, so much so that they fined him for reminding them of their troubles.
The Suda tells us that Neophron (whose dates are hotly contested) was the source for Euripides’ Medea.11 Some of the fragments from his Medea demonstrate his rhetorical prowess, as, for instance, a passage in which Medea addresses her passion (thume) and tries to dissuade it from impelling her to kill her children. She concludes with a striking image that could be a maxim and uses rhetorical phraseology: ‘I shall destroy my long labour in a brief moment’.12
Ion of Chios, born around 490, was an earlier contemporary of the major playwrights. His play (unnamed in the didaskalia) was defeated in 428 by Euripides’ Hippolytus. He is described in Longinus’ On the Sublime (33, written perhaps in the first century AD) as an accomplished writer in the ‘smooth’ style, but lacking in Sophocles’ and Pindar’s force. Only sixty-eight fragments of his works survive, and all are brief.13 Fragment 55 includes the pithy ‘do not set great store on the maxim ‘‘Know thyself’’, because Zeus alone has such knowledge’. These maxims had popularity in later speeches.
Around 330 the Athenian statesman Lycurgus had copies of some of the most popular texts deposited in official archives and future performances had to conform to them. By the second to third century AD the number of plays that were in circulation was reduced, and at this time the canonical seven for Aeschylus, seven for Sophocles and ten for Euripides (of the nineteen surviving plays) were all that were commonly used as texts.
World History
