Page:The Theatre of the Greeks, a Treatise on the History and Exhibition of the Greek Drama, with Various Supplements.djvu/190

 172 THE COMEDIANS WHO PRECEDED OR WERE 419 B.C.^ According to one account he was thrown overboard by Alcibiades on his way to Sicily in 415 B. c, in consequence of some invectives against that celebrated man, which he had intro- duced into one of his Comedies. This story is improbable in itself; and it is, besides, refuted by two circumstances : Eratosthenes ad- duced some Comedies which he had written after the year 415 B.c.^, and Pausanias tells us that his tomb was on the banks of the Asopus in the territory of the Sicyonians^. According to another account, he fell in a sea-fight in the Hellespont ; and -^gina is said to have been the place of his burial. The titles of twenty -four of his Comedies have been preserved^. Eupolis was very personal and scurrilous, and almost every one of his plays seems to have been written to caricature and lampoon some obnoxious individual. The Mapt/ca? was a professed attack upon the demagogue Hyper- bolus^; in the Avt6vko<; he ridiculed the handsome pancratiast of that name^ ; in the Ao-TparevTOL, which was probably a pasquinade, directed against the useless and cowardly citizens of Athens, Me- lanthius was denounced as an epicure"^ ; the BaTrrai dealt very hardly with Alcibiades^; and in the KaKwve^ he inveighed against Cimon, both in his public and private character, because that statesman was thought to incline too much to the Spartans, and showed in every action a desire to counteract the democratical principle, which was at work in the Athenian constitution^. Ari- ^ See Clinton, under these years. Autolycus was a sort of Agathon ; like Agathon lie obtained a victory at the public games, and is the hero of a symposium (Athen. v. 187 r, 217 D, and Xenoph. Symposium)', and, like Agathon, he was courted for his personal attractions, Athen. p. i88 A. 2 Quis enim non dixit, Ei/'ttoXij', tov t^s dpxaias, ab Alcibiade, navigante in Sici- liam, dejectum esse in mare? Redarguit Eratosthenes. Adfert enim, quas ille post id tempus fabulas docuerit. Cicero ad A tt. vi. i . 3 Pausan. 11. 7, 3. 4 Fabricius, 11. p. 445, Harles. ^ Schol. Ntth. 591: edtdoixOr} Kad' 'Tirep^oXov fiera tov KXiuvos ddvarov. See also the passage from the 'lirirrjs quoted below. ^ Athen. V. 216, where Eupolis is said to have brought out this piece under the name of Demostratus, probably the same as Demopceetus, a comic poet mentioned by Suidas, V. X'^P"^* There were two editions of the Autolycus. 7 Schol. Aristoph. Pax, 808. ^ Themist. p. no B. The words of Juvenal, 11. 91, if they refer to this Comedy, would imply that the obscene rites of Cotytto were the objects of his censure — Talia secreta coluerunt orgia tseda Cecropiam soliti Baptce lassare Cotytto. On the Cotyttia and the Baptae, see Buttmann, Mythol. 11. p. 159 sqq. and Meineke, Hist. Crit. p. 119 sqq, ^ Plutarch, Cim. XV. With regard to the name of the Comedy, we may remark, that Cimon had called his son Lacedsemonius (see Thucyd. I. 45), and that the name of the son was often an epithet of the father. Miiller, Dor. i. 3, § 10, note (f).