Pherecrates, Greek poet of the Old Attic Comedy, was a contemporary of Plato, Cratinus, Crates and Aristophanes. At first an actor, he seems to have gained a prize for a play in 437 B.C. or 438 B.C., at the Dionysia. The only other ascertained date in his life is 420, when he produced his play The Wild Men.

Like Crates, whom he imitated, he abandoned personal satire for more general themes, although in some of the fragments of his plays we find him attacking Alcibiades, the tragic poet Melanthius and others. He was especially famed for his inventive imagination, and the elegance and purity of his diction are attested by the epithet "most Attic" applied to him by Athenaeus and the sophist Phrynichus.

The fragments of Pherecrates are given, with those of Eupolis, by Runkel, and also by Meineke, Comic. Graec. Fragm., vol. i., p. 87, seqq., ed. min.

References

Marcella Farioli, Mundus alter. Utopie e distopie nella commedia greca antica. Milano: Vita e Pensiero, 2001. Pp. 293. ISBN 88-343-0720-8. (Review)

Other Old Comedy writer: Eupolis

This article incorporates text from the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica, which is in the public domain.