Cratinus

Cratinus, a Greek comic poet, born about 519 B.C., who did not begin to exhibit till sixty-five, and who died in 424. Next to his younger contemporaries, Eupolis and Aristophanes, he best represents the Old Attic comedy. He changed its outward form considerably, limiting the number of actors to three, and he was the first to add to comedy the interest of pungent and personal attack. The habits, manners, and institutions of his fellow-citizens he considered a legitimate mark for censorious satire. Even the great Pericles did not escape. Aristophanes repaid him in kind, but his allegation of habitual intemperance Cratinus himself admitted and defended humorously in his Pytine. His style was very metaphysical and ingenious. Of his twenty-one comedies, nine of which obtained the first prize in the public competitions, we possess only some fragments, collected by Meineke in his Fragmenta Comicorum Græcorum (Berlin, 1840).—There was also a younger CRATINUS, an Athenian contemporary of Plato, who belonged to the school of the Middle Comedy.