Tragic poets
group · 3 works · 3 mentions · 3 anchored passages
tragic poets · first inventors of tragedy
in the texts
Against Ctesiphon
Poets used in a hypothetical comparison about intolerable public honor.
If any one of the tragic poets who are to bring on their plays after the crowning should in a tragedy represent Thersites as crowned by the Greeks, no one of you would tolerate it, for Homer says he was a coward and a slanderer;
Panathenaicus
Poets at the Dionysia invoked as public sources for the Adrastus and Thebes story.
For who does not himself know or has not heard from the tragic poets at the Dionysia of the misfortunes which befell Adrastus at Thebes, how in his desire to restore to power the son of Oedipus, his own son-in-law, he lost a great number of his Argive soldiers in the battle and saw all of his captains slain, though saving his own life in dishonor, and, when he failed to obtain a truce and was unab …
To Nicocles
The tragic poets are invoked as artists who shape myths into staged action that appeals to both hearing and sight.
Wherefore we may well admire the poet Homer and the first inventors of tragedy, seeing that they, with true insight into human nature, have embodied both kinds of pleasure in their poetry;
for Homer has dressed the contests and battles of the demigods in myths, while the tragic poets have rendered the myths in the form of contests and action, so that they are presented, not to our ears alone, but to our eyes as well.