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. Agathon was also the first playwright to write choral parts which were apparently independent from the main plot of his plays.Īgathon 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.
Agathon introduced certain innovations into the Greek theater: Aristotle tells us in the Poetics (1456a) that the characters and plot of his Anthos were original and not, following Athenian dramatic orthodoxy, borrowed from mythological or historical subjects. Together with Pausanias, he later moved to the court of Archelaus, king of Macedon, who was recruiting playwrights it is here that he probably died around 401 BC. He is also a prominent character in Aristophanes' comedy the Thesmophoriazusae.Īgathon was the son of Tisamenus, and the lover of Pausanias, with whom he appears in both the Symposium and Plato's Protagoras. 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.
400 BC) was an Athenian tragic poet whose works have been lost. This painting by Anselm Feuerbach re-imagines a scene from Plato's Symposium, in which the tragedian Agathon welcomes the drunken Alcibiades into his home.
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