Epicharmus sentence example
epicharmus
- Epicharmus (540-450), carried as a babe to Sicily, is a link between native Siceliots and the strangers invited by Hiero; as the founder of the local Sicilian comedy, he ranks among Siceliots.
- The spread of Hellenic culture among the Sicels had in return made a Greek home for many Sicel beliefs, traditions and customs. Bucolic poetry is the native growth of Sicily; in the hands of Theocritus it grew out of the germs supplied by Epicharmus and Sophron into a distinct and finished form of the art.
- Among these were included metrical versions of the physical speculations of Epicharmus, of the gastronomic researches of Archestratus of Gela (Hedyphagetica), and, probably, of the rationalistic doctrines of Euhemerus.
- Epicharmus was the chief representative of the Sicilian or Dorian comedy.
- Accordingly, the comedies of Epicharmus are of two kinds, neither of them calculated to give offence to the ruler.Advertisement
- Plato (Theaetetus, 15 2 E) puts him at the head of the masters of comedy, coupling his name with Homer and, according to a remark in Diogenes Laertius, Plato was indebted to Epicharmus for much of his philosophy.
- Ennius called his didactic poem on natural philosophy Epicharmus after the comic poet.
- The metres employed by Epicharmus were iambic trimeter, and especially trochaic and anapaestic tetrameter.
- The Platonic dialogue, however, was founded on the mime, which had been cultivated half a century earlier by the Sicilian poets, Sophron and Epicharmus.
- Girard, E tudes sur la poesie grecque (1884); Kaibel in PaulyWissowa's Realencyclopddie, according to whom Epicharmus was a Siceliot; for the papyrus fragment, Blass in Jahrbiicher fur Philologie, cxxxix., 1889.Advertisement