
Agathon (; ; ) was an
Athenian
Athens ( ) is the Capital city, capital and List of cities and towns in Greece, largest city of Greece. A significant coastal urban area in the Mediterranean, Athens is also the capital of the Attica (region), Attica region and is the southe ...
tragic poet whose works have been lost. He is best known for his appearance in
Plato
Plato ( ; Greek language, Greek: , ; born BC, died 348/347 BC) was an ancient Greek philosopher of the Classical Greece, Classical period who is considered a foundational thinker in Western philosophy and an innovator of the writte ...
's ''
Symposium,'' which describes the
banquet
A banquet (; ) is a formal large meal where a number of people consume food together. Banquets are traditionally held to enhance the prestige of a host, or reinforce social bonds among joint contributors. Modern examples of these purposes inc ...
given to celebrate his obtaining a prize for his first
tragedy
A tragedy is a genre of drama based on human suffering and, mainly, the terrible or sorrowful events that befall a tragic hero, main character or cast of characters. Traditionally, the intention of tragedy is to invoke an accompanying catharsi ...
at the
Lenaia in 416.
He is also a prominent character in
Aristophanes
Aristophanes (; ; ) was an Ancient Greece, Ancient Greek Ancient Greek comedy, comic playwright from Classical Athens, Athens. He wrote in total forty plays, of which eleven survive virtually complete today. The majority of his surviving play ...
' comedy the ''
Thesmophoriazusae''.
Life and career
Agathon was the son of Tisamenus,
and the lover of
Pausanias, with whom he appears in both the ''Symposium'' and Plato's ''
Protagoras''. Together with Pausanias, around 407 BC he moved to the court of
Archelaus, king of
Macedon
Macedonia ( ; , ), also called Macedon ( ), was an ancient kingdom on the periphery of Archaic and Classical Greece, which later became the dominant state of Hellenistic Greece. The kingdom was founded and initially ruled by the royal ...
, who was recruiting playwrights; it is here that he probably died around 401 BC. Agathon introduced certain innovations into the Greek theater:
Aristotle
Aristotle (; 384–322 BC) was an Ancient Greek philosophy, Ancient Greek philosopher and polymath. His writings cover a broad range of subjects spanning the natural sciences, philosophy, linguistics, economics, politics, psychology, a ...
tells us in the ''
Poetics'' (1451
b21) that the characters and plot of his ''
Anthos'' were original and not, following Athenian dramatic orthodoxy, borrowed from mythological or historical subjects. Agathon was also the first playwright to write choral parts which were apparently independent from the main plot of his plays.
Agathon is portrayed by Plato as a handsome young man, well dressed, of polished manners, courted by the fashion, wealth, and wisdom of Athens, and dispensing hospitality with ease and refinement. The
epideictic speech in praise of love which Agathon recites in the ''Symposium'' is full of beautiful but artificial rhetorical expressions, and has led some scholars to believe he may have been a student of
Gorgias. In the ''Symposium,'' Agathon is presented as the friend of the comic poet Aristophanes, but this alleged friendship did not prevent Aristophanes from harshly criticizing Agathon in at least two of his comic plays: the ''Thesmophoriazousae'' and the (now lost) ''Gerytades''. In the later play ''Frogs'', Aristophanes softens his criticisms, but even so, it may be only for the sake of punning on Agathon's name (ἁγαθός "good") that he makes
Dionysus
In ancient Greek religion and Greek mythology, myth, Dionysus (; ) is the god of wine-making, orchards and fruit, vegetation, fertility, festivity, insanity, ritual madness, religious ecstasy, and theatre. He was also known as Bacchus ( or ; ...
call him a "good poet".
Agathon was also a friend of
Euripides
Euripides () was a Greek tragedy, tragedian of classical Athens. Along with Aeschylus and Sophocles, he is one of the three ancient Greek tragedians for whom any plays have survived in full. Some ancient scholars attributed ninety-five plays to ...
, another recruit to the court of Archelaus of Macedon.
Physical appearance
Agathon's extraordinary physical beauty is brought up repeatedly in the sources; the historian W. Rhys Roberts observes that "ὁ καλός Ἀγάθων (''ho kalos Agathon'') has become almost a stereotyped phrase." The most detailed surviving description of Agathon is in the ''Thesmophoriazousae,'' in which Agathon appears as a pale, clean-shaven young man dressed in women's clothes. Scholars are unsure how much of Aristophanes' portrayal is fact and how much mere comic invention.
After a close reading of the ''Thesmophoriazousae,'' the historian Jane McIntosh Snyder observed that Agathon's costume was almost identical to that of the famous lyric poet
Anacreon, as he is portrayed in early 5th-century vase-paintings. Snyder theorizes that Agathon might have made a deliberate effort to mimic the sumptuous attire of his famous fellow poet, although by Agathon's time, such clothing, especially the κεκρύφαλος (''kekryphalos'', an elaborate covering for the hair) had long fallen out of fashion for men. According to this interpretation, Agathon is mocked in the ''Thesmophoriazousae'' not only for his notorious effeminacy, but also for the pretentiousness of his dress: "he seems to think of himself, in all his elegant finery, as a rival to the old Ionian poets, perhaps even to Anacreon himself."
Plato's epigram
Agathon is the subject of an
epigram attributed to Plato:
τὴν ψυχὴν Ἀγάθωνα φιλῶν ἐπὶ χείλεσιν εἶχον·
ἦλθε γὰρ ἡ τλήμων ὡς διαβησομένη.
One translation reads:
My soul was on my lips as I was kissing Agathon. Poor soul! she came hoping to cross over to him.[Greek Anthology'', translated by W. R. Paton]
Volume 1
The epigram was probably not composed by Plato. Stylistic evidence suggests that the poem (with most of Plato's other alleged epigrams) was actually written sometime after Plato had died: its form is that of the Hellenistic erotic epigram, which did not become popular until after 300 BC. According to 20th-century scholar Walther Ludwig, the poems were spuriously inserted into an early biography of Plato sometime between 250 BC and 100 BC and adopted by later writers from this source.
It is unlikely Plato would write a love epigram about Agathon, who was approximately twenty years older than he.
Known plays
Of Agathon's plays, only six titles and thirty-one fragments have survived:
*''Aerope''
*''Alcmeon''
*''
Anthos'' or ''Antheus'' ("The Flower")
*''Mysoi'' ("Mysians")
*''Telephos'' ("
Telephus")
*''Thyestes''
Fragments in
A Nauck, ''Tragicorum graecorum fragmenta'' (1887).
Fragments in Greek with English translations in Matthew Wright's "The Lost Plays of Greek Tragedy (Volume 1)
Neglected Authors" (2016)
Quotations
See also
*
List of speakers in Plato's dialogues
*
Symposium (Feuerbach)
References
Notes
Sources
*''The Drama: Its History, Literature and Influence on Civilization'', volume 1, by Alfred Bates. (
London
London is the Capital city, capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of both England and the United Kingdom, with a population of in . London metropolitan area, Its wider metropolitan area is the largest in Wester ...
: Historical Publishing Company, 1906)
*''Thesmoph.'' 59, 106, ''Eccles.'' 100 (
Aristophanes
Aristophanes (; ; ) was an Ancient Greece, Ancient Greek Ancient Greek comedy, comic playwright from Classical Athens, Athens. He wrote in total forty plays, of which eleven survive virtually complete today. The majority of his surviving play ...
)
*''Lovers' Lips'' by
Plato
Plato ( ; Greek language, Greek: , ; born BC, died 348/347 BC) was an ancient Greek philosopher of the Classical Greece, Classical period who is considered a foundational thinker in Western philosophy and an innovator of the writte ...
in the
Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg (PG) is a volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works, as well as to "encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks."
It was founded in 1971 by American writer Michael S. Hart and is the oldest digital li ...
eText ''Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology'' by
J. W. Mackail
External links
*
*
Agathon Poems
{{Authority control
440s BC births
Year of birth unknown
400s BC deaths
Year of death unknown
5th-century BC Athenians
Ancient Athenian dramatists and playwrights
Ancient Greek LGBTQ people
Courtiers of Archelaus of Macedon
Ancient Greek tragic poets
5th-century BC Greek poets