Antiphanes (comic poet)

Antiphanes (* 408 BC in Athens; † 332 BC ) next to Alexis was the most important poet of the middle Attic comedy.

Antiphanes came from an immigrant Thessalian gender, reached an age of 74 years and wrote 260 pieces that dramatic talent, skill and wit are nachgerühmt form. About 200 of them are known to us through titles and fragments (collected by August Meineke in the Fragmenta Comicorum Graecorum, Vol 3).

Work

When democracy was overthrown after the surrender of Athens to Lysander, there was a strict censorship of the comic poet, and after re-establishing the rule of the people by Thrasybulus the spirit witty arrogance had become so tame that the previous audacity did not want to adjust again.

As a poet of the middle Attic comedy was thus Antiphanes ' principal area less dedicated political in character, but rather a parody of the tragic poets, even the parodic representation of the entire mythology, next to the mockery of the philosophers and bustle and even the depiction of ordinary life in typical characters. Alexis and offered him Homer and the tragedians the main joke material, the rationalist mockery exercised on the poems once held sacred. The elaborate orchestrischen choral singing and the parabases fell away.