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The Attic poets called him squill-head, and the comic poet Cratinus, in his play Chirones, says; "From Chronos old and faction Is sprung a tyrant dread, And all Olympus calls him The man-compelling head." And again in the play of Nemesis: "Come, hospitable Zeus, with lofty head." Teleclides, too, speaks of him as sitting
This description coincides with the idea of parody, which we placed foremost in our account of the Old Comedy. Platonius adduces also another instance in the Ulysses of Cratinus, a burlesque of the Odyssey. But, in order of time, no play of Cratinus could belong to the Middle Comedy; for his death is mentioned by Aristophanes in his Peace.
The attempt of "Classen and others" to explain the involutions and anacolutha of Thucydides by "the undeveloped condition of Attic prose, and the difficulties of wrestling with an unformed idiom to express adequately great and pregnant thoughts," is triumphantly refuted by the statement that "Euripides and Cratinus had already perfected the use of Attic Greek in dramatic dialogue," and "in Attic prose Antiphon had already attained clearness, as we can see in his extant speeches."
All his laws he established for an hundred years, and wrote them on wooden tables or rollers, named axones, which might be turned round in oblong cases; some of their relics were in my time still to be seen in the Prytaneum, or common hall, at Athens. These, as Aristotle states, were called cyrbes, and there is a passage of Cratinus the comedian,
A single age sufficed to illustrate Tragedy, in the persons of Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides: ancient comedy under Cratinus, Aristophanes, and Eumolpides, and in like manner the new comedy under Menander, Diphilus, and Philemon.
This work Cratinus ridicules, as long in finishing, 'Tis long since Pericles, if words would do it, Talk'd up the wall; yet adds not one mite to it.
From these statements I conceive myself justified in assuming that among the pieces of Aristophanes, the Knights is the most in the style of Cratinus, and the Birds in that of Eupolis; and that he had their respective manners in view when he composed these pieces.
Aristophanes was 'profane, under satiric direction, unlike his rivals Cratinus, Phrynichus, Ameipsias, Eupolis, and others, if we are to believe him, who in their extraordinary Donnybrook Fair of the day of Comedy, thumped one another and everybody else with absolute heartiness, as he did, but aimed at small game, and dragged forth particular women, which he did not.
Aristophanes was 'profane, under satiric direction, unlike his rivals Cratinus, Phrynichus, Ameipsias, Eupolis, and others, if we are to believe him, who in their extraordinary Donnybrook Fair of the day of Comedy, thumped one another and everybody else with absolute heartiness, as he did, but aimed at small game, and dragged forth particular women, which he did not.
So great was the impetus given to the new art, that a crowd of writers followed simultaneously, whose very names it is wearisome to mention. Of these the most eminent were Cratinus and Crates. Plutarch quotes some lines from this author, which allude to the liberality of Cimon with something of that patron-loving spirit which was rather the characteristic of a Roman than an Athenian poet.
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