Archippus (;

Ancient Greek Ancient Greek includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek (), Dark Ages (), the Archaic p ...

: Ἅρχιππος; fl. late 5th century BC) was an

Athenian Athens ( ; el, Αθήνα, Athína ; grc, Ἀθῆναι, Athênai (pl.) ) is both the capital and largest city of Greece. With a population close to four million, it is also the seventh largest city in the European Union. Athens dominates ...

poet of the

Old Comedy Old Comedy (''archaia'') is the first period of the ancient Greek comedy, according to the canonical division by the Alexandrian grammarians.Mastromarco (1994) p.12 The most important Old Comic playwright is Aristophanes – whose works, with the ...

. His most famous play was the ''Fishes'', in which he satirized the fondness of the Athenian

epicure Epicureanism is a system of philosophy developed by Epicurus ca. 300 BCE. Epicurean or epicure may also refer to: *Epicure (gourmet), a person interested in food, sometimes with overtones of excessive refinement *'' The Epicurean'', 1827 novel w ...

s for fish. The Alexandrian critics attributed to him the authorship of four plays previously assigned to

Aristophanes Aristophanes (; grc, Ἀριστοφάνης, ; c. 446 – c. 386 BC), son of Philippus, of the deme Kydathenaion ( la, Cydathenaeum), was a comic playwright or comedy-writer of ancient Athens and a poet of Old Attic Comedy. Eleven of his for ...

(''Dionysus Shipwrecked'', ''Islands'', ''Niobos'', and ''Poetry''). Archippus was ridiculed by his contemporaries for his fondness for playing upon words.Schol. on Aristophanes, ''

Wasps A wasp is any insect of the narrow-waisted suborder Apocrita of the order Hymenoptera which is neither a bee nor an ant; this excludes the broad-waisted sawflies (Symphyta), which look somewhat like wasps, but are in a separate suborder. ...

'', 481 Titles and fragments of six plays are preserved: ''Amphitryon'', ''The Donkey's Shadow'', ''Fishes'', ''Hercules Getting Married'', ''Pinon'', and ''Ploutos''.

Notes

References

* * T. Kock (1880) ''Comicorum Atticorum Fragmenta'', i. * A. Meineke (1885) ''Poetarum Comicorum Graecorum Fragmenta'' {{DEFAULTSORT:Archippus (Poet) Ancient Greek dramatists and playwrights Ancient Greek poets Old Comic poets