Epicharmus

Kathryn Bosher (Independent Scholar - North America)
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Epicharmus was a comic playwright and perhaps a philosopher, who worked in Syracuse in the first half of the 5th century BCE. He was a contemporary of Aeschylus, as well as Pindar and Bacchylides. Little of his work survives, but antiquity thought very highly of him. He is credited, for example, with the invention of comic plot structure, and praised and remembered well into the Roman period. He is important not only in his own right, but because he shows that the development of ancient drama was not the story of Athens alone. At least one other city, Syracuse, played an important role.

Many tales circulated about Epicharmus in antiquity. These give us a sense of his enormous importance in the history of Greek literature, but they obscure the details of his life, and even of his work.

1838 words

Citation: Bosher, Kathryn. "Epicharmus". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 20 June 2007 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=11802, accessed 19 March 2024.]

11802 Epicharmus 1 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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