Page:The Theatre of the Greeks, a Treatise on the History and Exhibition of the Greek Drama, with Various Supplements.djvu/185

 CONTEMPORARY WITH ARISTOPHANES. 167 it is probable that Phormis or Pliormus^, preceded liim by a few Olympiads ; for he was the tutor to the children of Gelon, Hiero's predecessor. He is supposed to have been the same with the Phormis of Maenalus, who distinguished himself in the service of Gelo and Hiero in a military capacity^. From the titles of his plays, it is presumed that they were mythological parodies'^. He is said to have been the first to cover the stage with pui-ple skins^ DiNOLOCHUS, according to Suidas the son, according to others the scholar of Epicharmus, flourished about B.C. 487. He was a native of Syracuse or Agrigentum : probably he was born at the latter place, and represented at S}Tacuse. ^lian says he con- tended with Epicharmus^. While the Doric Comedy was rapidly advancing to perfection in Sicily, a comic drama originally perhaps of much the same kind, sprang up in Attica. This was the old Comedy, which was repre- sented by a list of forty poets, and some three hundi-ed plays, including in the calculation the great name of Aristophanes. Eeserving him and his works for a separate chapter we shall here enumerate the leading poets of the old Comedy, who were his pre- decessors or contemporaries. Chionides, who is called the first writer of the old Athenian Comedy, was a contemporary of the Sicilian comedians'. To judge from the three titles which have come down to us — the "Hpwe?, Uepaat y ' AcrcrvpiOL, and the Hrw^^^ot, we should conclude that his Comedies had a political reference, and were full of per- sonal satire ; and, from an allusion in Yitruvius®, we may infer, 1 Aristot. Poet. III. 5 ; v, 5. ^ Athenaeus, xiv. 652 a; Suidas ^opjios. 3 Pausan. v. 27, i. Bentley thinks he is the same with the poet : not so Miiller, Dor. IV. 7, § 2, note (g). ^ Three of them were called Ke0atos, 'AXKvoves, and 'Wiov TrSpdrjcris. ^ Suid. Comp. Aristot. EtJdc. IV. 2, 20. 6 ^lian, ff.A. VI. 51. ^ Suidas, s. v. Xwpidrjs, says that he was the TrpooTayuvijTris rrjs apxalas KcofioiSlas, and that he exhibited eight years before the Persian war, i. e. in B, C. 488. Aristotle therefore, or rather, his interpolator (Poet. ill. 5), must be misinformed when he says that Epicharmus flourished long before Chionides and Magues. ^ "Hffic ita esse plures philosophi dixerunt, non minus etiam poeta^; qui antiquas