Phrynichus, (1) an Athenian tragic poet, who gained his first dramatic prize in 511 B.C., twelve years before Æschylus, and his last in 476, when Themistocles was his choragus. He seems to have gone to the court of Hiero in Sicily, and to have died there. He introduced masks representing women, and to the light mimetic chorus of Thespis added the sublime music of the dithyrambic choruses. His most famous tragedies were the Phænissæ, which is supposed to have inspired the Persæ of Æschylus, and another which had for its subject the capture of Miletus by the Persians. So overpowering was its effect that the audience burst into a passion of tears, fined the poet a thousand drachmæ for so harrowing a description of the sufferings of a kindred people, and forbade the piece ever again to be represented. His scanty fragments will be found in Nauck's Tragicorum Græcorum fragmenta (1856).
(2) A poet of the old Attic comedy, who was honoured by the abuse of his great contemporary Aristophanes (Ran. 14) for his low buffoonery. His fragments are collected in Meineke's Fragmenta Comicorum Græcorum (1839-57) and Koch's Comicorum Atticorum fragmenta (1880 et seq.).
(3) A Greek grammarian and sophist who flourished under Marcus Aurelius, and wrote a collection of select specimens of Attic usage intended for the benefit of his friend Cornelianus, secretary to the emperor. It consists of about four hundred short unconnected dicta on the orthography, signification, and use of particular words, and upon the rules of accidence, especially in verbs. The edition by Lobeck (1820) was followed by The New Phrynichus, by W. Gunion Rutherford (1881).