Plato (comic poet)


Plato was an Athenian comic poet and contemporary of Aristophanes. None of his plays survive intact, but the titles of thirty of them are known, including a Hyperbolus, Victories, Cleophon, and Phaon. The titles suggest that his themes were often political. In 410 BC, one of his plays took first prize at the City Dionysia.
Phaon included a scene in which a character sits down to study a poem about gastronomy and reads some of it aloud. The poem is in hexameters, and therefore sounds like a lampoon of the work of Archestratus, although the speaker calls it "a book by Philoxenus", meaning either the poet Philoxenus of Cythera, the glutton Philoxenus of Leucas, or both indiscriminately.

Surviving Titles and Fragments

Of Plato the comic poet's plays, only the following thirty titles have come down to us, along with 292 associated fragments.