Agathon Press

Agathon (; ; ) was an Athenian tragic poet whose works have been lost. He is best known for his appearance in Plato's ''Symposium,'' which describes the banquet given to celebrate his obtaining a prize for his first tragedy at the Lenaia in 416. He is also a prominent character in Aristophanes' 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, who was recruiting playwrights; it is here that he probably died around 401 BC. Agathon introduced certain innovations into the Greek theater: Aristotle 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 call him a "good poet".

Agathon was also a friend of Euripides, 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
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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: Historical Publishing Company, 1906)
*''Thesmoph.'' 59, 106, ''Eccles.'' 100 (Aristophanes)
*''Lovers' Lips'' by Plato in the Project Gutenberg eText ''Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology'' by J. W. Mackail

External links

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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