Susarion

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Susarion (Greek: Σουσαρίων) was an early Greek comic poet from Tripodiscus in Megaris. He is regarded as one of the first to create metrical comedy and, by some, as the founder of Attic Comedy. Almost none of his work survives, except for one iambic fragment that likely belongs to the iambus tradition rather than a true comedy.

Around 580 BC he moved Megarian comedy to Icaria, an Attic deme and the cradle of tragedy and Dionysus worship. A competition at that time reportedly offered a basket of figs and an amphora of wine as a prize. Susarion’s improvements to the old farces probably involved using metrical verses instead of improvised chorus lines, and these performances were meant to be recited rather than written down.

The Athenians did not take to this new style, and nothing more is heard of Susarion’s drama for about eighty years. Some scholars, including Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, suggested that Megarian comedy was an Athenian invention satirizing Megarian coarseness, and the lines attributed to Susarion are considered probably not genuine.

The only surviving fragment, reconstructed from later sources, is a brief and rough line that suggests concerns about women and marriage as burdens.