AGATHON

A tragic poet of Athens, born B.C. 448, a friend of Euripides and Plato, universally celebrated for his beauty and refined culture. The banquet he gave in honour of his dramatic victory of B.C. 417 is immortalized in Plato's Symposion. He was, together with Euripides, at the court of Archelaus, king of Macedonia, and probably died there about B.C. 402. He appears to have carried still further the rhetorical manner of Euripides, adopting entirely the views of the sophist Gorgias; and his namby-pamby style is ridiculed by Aristophanes. On the stage he introduced several innovations: he was the first to make the chorus a mere intermezzo, having nothing to do with the action, and in his tragedy of Anthos (=flower) he invented both characters and plot for himself, instead of resorting to old myths.