(Κρατῖνος), Comic poets.
1. One of the most celebrated Athenian comic poets of the old comedy, the rise and complete perfection of which he witnessed during a life of 97 years. The dates of his birth and death can be ascertained with tolerable certainty from the following circumstances :--In the year 424 B. C., Aristophanes exhibited his Knights, in which he described Cratinus as a drivelling old man, wandering about with his crown withered, and so utterly neglected by his former admirers that he could not even procure wherewithal to quench the thirst of which he was perishing. (Equit. 531-534.) This attack roused Cratinus to put forth all his remaining strength in the play entitled Πυτίνη (the Flagon), which was exhibited the next year, and with which he carried away the first prize above the Connus of Ameipsias and the Clouds of Aristophanes. (Arg. Nub.) Now Lucian says that the Πυτίνη was the last play of Cratinus, and that he did not long survive his victory. (Macrob. 25.) Aristophanes also, in the Peace, which was acted in 419 B. C., says that Cratinus died ὅθ̓ οἱ Λάκωνες ἐνέβαλον. (Pax, 700, 701.) A doubt has been raised as to what invasion Aristophanes meant. He cannot refer to any of the great invasions mentioned by Thucydides, and we are therefore compelled to suppose some irruption of a part of the Lacedaemonian army into Attica at the time when the armistice, which was made shortly before the negotiations for the fifty years' truce, was broken. (B. C. 422.) Now Lucian says (l.c.) that Cratinus lived 97 years. Thus his birth would fall in B. C. 519.
If we may trust the grammarians and chronographers, Cratinus did not begin his dramatic career till he was far advanced in life. According to an Anonymous writer on Comedy (p. xxix), he gained his first victory after the 85th Olympiad, that is, later than B. C. 437, and when he was more than 80 years old. This date is suspicious in itself, and is falsified by circumstantial evidence. For example, in one fragment he blames the tardiness of Pericles in completing the long walls which we know to have been finished in B. C. 451, and there are a few other fragments which evidently belong to an earlier period than the 85th Olympiad. Again, Crates the comic poet acted the plays of Cratinus before he began to write himself ; but Crates began to write in B. C. 449-448. We can therefore have no hesitation in preferring the date of Eusebius (Chron. s. a. Ol. 81. 3; Syncell. p. 339), although he is manifestly wrong in joining the name of Plato with that of Cratinus. According to this testimony, Cratinus began to exhibit in B. C. 454-453, in about the 66th year of his age.
Of his personal history very little is known. His father's name was Callimedes, and he himself was taxiarch of the Φυλή Οἰνήϊς. (Suid. s. vv. Κρατῖνος, Ἐρειοῦ δειλότερος.) In the latter passage he is charged with excessive cowardice. Of the charges which Suidas brings against the moral character of Cratinus, one is unsupported by any other testimony, though, if it had been true, it is not likely that Aristophanes would have been silent upon it. Probably Suidas was misled by a passage of Aristophanes (Aristoph. Ach. 849, 850) which refers to another Cratinus, a lyric poet. (Schol. l.c.) The other charge which Suidas brings against Cratinus, that of habitual intemperance, is sustained by many passages of Aristophanes and other writers, as well as by the confession of Cratinus himself, who appears to have treated the subject in a very amusing way, especially in his Πυτίνη. (See further on this point Meineke, Hist. Crit. Com. Graec. pp. 47-49.)