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Updated: June 14, 2025
This the others declaimed against with all the vehemence possible, and began to revive those stories concerning him and his sister, and cried out against him as the partisan of the Lacedaemonians. To these calumnies the famous verses of Eupolis, the poet upon Cimon refer:
Cratinus, and his younger contemporaries Eupolis and Aristophanes, were the three great poets of what is called the Old Attic Comedy. The comedies of Cratinus and Eupolis are lost; but of Aristophanes, who was the greatest of the three, we have eleven dramas extant. ARISTOPHANES was born about 444 B.C. Of his private life we know positively nothing.
Though affable and persuasive in private circles, he could not speak equally well in public, for he was, as Eupolis says, "At conversation best of men, at public speaking worst." In a certain attack on Alkibiades and Phaeax, we find, among other charges, Alkibiades accused of using the gold and silver plate of the city of Athens as his own for his daily use.
Nicias was arrived at a mature age, and was esteemed their first general. Phaeax was but a rising statesman like Alcibiades; he was descended from noble ancestors, but was his inferior, as in many other things, so, principally, in eloquence. He possessed rather the art of persuading in private conversation than of debate before the people, and was, as Eupolis said of him,
And a third, Eupolis, in the comedy called the Demi, in a series of questions about each of the demagogues, whom he makes in the play to come up from hell, upon Pericles being named last, exclaims, And here by way of summary, now we've done, Behold, in brief, the heads of all in one. Though Aristotle tells us that he was thoroughly practiced in all accomplishments of this kind by Pythoclides.
These imputations are alluded to in the hackneyed lines of Eupolis: "Not a villain beyond measure, Only fond of drink and pleasure; Oft he slept in Sparta's town, And left his sister here alone."
He was admired to late posterity, and by Roman critics, for the grace and even for the grandeur of his hardy verses; and Quintilian couples him with Eupolis and Aristophanes as models for the formation of orators. He had previously been an actor, and performed the principal characters in the plays of Cratinus.
The reference seems to be to a passage in Plutarch's Alcibiades, where Phaeax is thus described: 'He seemed fitter for soliciting and persuading in private than for stemming the torrent of a public debate; in short, he was one of those of whom Eupolis says: "True he can talk, and yet he is no speaker." Langhome's Plutarch, ed. 1809, ii. 137.
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