Page:The Theatre of the Greeks, a Treatise on the History and Exhibition of the Greek Drama, with Various Supplements.djvu/181

 REMAINING TRAGEDIANS. 163 SosiCLES, of Syracuse, gained seven victories, and wrote seventy-three Tragedies. He flom-ished in the reigns of Philip and Alexander of Macedon^. The tyrants Critias and Dionysius the elder, and the rheto- rician Theodectes obtained some eminence as Tragedians. In the reign of Ptolemy Philadelphus, seven tragic poets flourished at Alexandria, who were called the Pleias^ ; their names were, Homerus, Sositheus, Lycophron, Alexander Etolus, ^antides, Sosiphanes, and Philiscus^ It is quite uncertain, however, how far their works possessed an independent and original character ; it is probable that the best of these trage- dies were servile imitations of the great Attic models*, and some of them may have been mere centos, not altogether unlike the Christus Patiens of Gregorius Nazianzenus^. 1 Suidas. He is not in Clinton's list. 2 The Alexandrian custom of making Pleiads or groups of seven for ''the stars" of the day, is shown also by the well-known enumeration of the seven wonders of the world. ^ The authorities do not agree in their lists of these tragedians. There are four different catalogues (Clinton, F. H. in, p. 502) ; Homerus, Philiscus, and Lycophron appear in all four ; Alexander yEtolus and Sositheus in three ; -^antides has three testimonies, and Sosiphanes has two; and Dionysides, who is substituted for Sosi- phanes in one of the lists, is attested by Strabo, xiv. p. 675. ^ In the list of Lycophron's tragedies we have two plays entitled CEdipus, and others called jEoIii^s, Andromeda, Hercides, Supplices, Hiptpolytus, Pentheus. 5 "The Alexandrine scholars also took to manufacturing tragedies ; but if we may form a judgment from the only extant specimen, Lycophron's Alexandra, which consists of an interminable monologue, full of vaticination and lumbered with obscure mythology, these productions of a would-be-poetical dilettantism were utterly lifeless, untheatrical, and every way flat and unprofitable. The creative power of the Greeks in this department was so completely defunct, that they were obliged to content them- selves with repetitions of the old masterpieces," On the Alexandra, which was not a tragedy, as Schlegel supposes, see Hist. Lit. Gr. 11. pp. 437 foil. 11—2