Aristo'menes

(Ἀριστομένης).

1. A comic poet of Athens. He belonged to the ancient Attic comedy, or more correctly to the second class of the poets constituting the old Attic comedy. For the ancients seem to distinguish the comic poets who flourished before the Peloponnesian war from those who lived during that war, and Aristomenes belonged to the latter. (Suidas, s. v. Ἀριστομένης ; Eudocia, p. 65; Argum. ad Aristoph. Equit.) He was sometimes ridiculed by the surname ὁ Δυροποιός,which may have been derived from the circumstance that either he himself or his father, at one time, was an artizan, perhaps a carpenter.

Works

As early as the year B. C. 425, he brought out a piece called ὑλοφόροι, on the same occasion that the Equites of Aristophanes and the Satyri of Cratinus were performed; and if it is true that another piece entitled Admetus was performed at the same time with the Plutus of Aristophanes, in B. C. 389, the dramatic career of Aristomenes was very long. (Argum. ad Aristoph. Plut.) But we know of only a few comedies of Aristomenes ; Meineke conjectures that the Admetus was brough out together with the first edition of Aristophanes' Plutus, an hypothesis based upon very weak grounds. Of the two plays mentioned no fragments are extant; besides these we know the titles and possess a few fragments of three others, viz.

1. Βοηθοί

which is sometimes attributed to Aristophanes, the names of Aristomenes and Aristophanes being often confounded in the MSS.

2. Γόητες

3. Διόνυσος ἀσκητής.

Other fragments

There are also three fragments of which it is uncertain whether they belong to any of the plays here mentioned, or to others, the titles of which are unknown.

Further Information

Athen. 1.11; Pollux, 7.167; Harpocrat. s. v.μετοίκιον. Comp. Meineke, Quaest. Scen. Spec. ii. p. 48, &c., Hist. Crit. Com. Gr. p. 210, &c.