redeems him from the clutches of the designing Pytîne. He won the first prize, and Aristophanes was last on the list. But a wreck he was after all, and was dead by 421. One of his actors—he employed three—was Crates, who wrote with some success, and has the distinction of having first produced drunken men on the stage.
Pherekrates, who won his first victory in 437, was a praiseworthy but tiresome writer, to judge by his very numerous fragments. He had better plots than his contemporaries, and approached the manner of the later comedy. He treats social subjects, such as the impudence of slaves and the ways of 'hetairai'; he has a violent attack on Timotheus and the new style of music. He also shows signs of the tendency which is so strong in Aristophanes, to make plays about imaginary regions of bliss; in his Miners,* for instance, a golden age is found going on somewhere deep in or under the earth, and in his Ant-Men* there was probably something similar. We only know of one political drama by him—an attack on Alcibiades.
Eupolis is the most highly praised of the contemporaries of Aristophanes. His characteristic was χάρις, 'charm' or 'grace,' as contrasted with the force and bitterness of Cratînus, and the mixture of the two in Aristophanes. These three formed the canon of comic writers in Alexandria. It is said that the death of Eupolis in battle at the Hellespont was the occasion of exemption from military service being granted to professional poets. His political tendencies were so far similar to those of Aristophanes that the two collaborated in the most savage piece of comedy extant, the Knights, and accused one another of plagiarism afterwards. That play was directed against Cleon. In the Marikâs*
