(fl Athens, c500 bce). Greek tragic and (probably) dithyrambic poet. He wrote 50 plays, 32 being satyr-plays, a form of which he was one of the first exponents. Four fragments of his lyric writing have survived. One of these (Campbell, frag.712=Edmonds, frag.5) is an exhortation to pursue ‘neither the intense [syntonon] nor the relaxed [aneimenan] Iastian’ but instead to ‘plough the middle [mesan: ‘mean’] furrow and Aeolize [i.e. ‘compose in the Aeolian harmonia’] in your melos’, since the Aeolian harmonia ‘is certainly suited to all song-braggarts’. Pratinas's reference was probably to the central concept of Hellenic ethos theory – the Mimesis of character traits. The Aeolian harmonia was thought to express the blithe, free-spoken nature of the Aeolian peoples; it was a mean between such intense modes as the Mixolydian and the serenity of the ‘relaxed’ Iastian (renamed Hypophrygian).
In a long fragment (Campbell, frag.708=Edmonds, frag.1) preserved in Athenaeus's The Sophists at Dinner (xiv, 617b–f), Pratinas complains of the abuses to which the Dithyramb has been subjected and especially the rising prominence of the aulos, which is criticized for its sound and, of course, for the typical unattractive smell, dampness and imprecision of all wind instruments. He writes:
The Muse established the song as queen; let the aulos dance behind, for it is the servant. It is accustomed to be the leader only for door-to-door carousels and the brawling of drunken young men. Drive away the one that has the breath of the spotted toad, burn the spit-soaked reed, the low-babbling-unmelodious-arythmic-stepping flatterer, its body formed by a reamer.
Athenaeus identifies this as an excerpt from a hyporcheme (huporchēma), but it seems clear that the same composition might fall into a number of different classifications. In any event, the abuses he condemned eventually had their most obvious effects on the dithyramb (see Timotheus), but tragic dramas of the late 5th century bce also show clear traces of such libretto writing. Line 12 of this fragment is thought to contain a punning reference (phruneou: ‘toad’) to the early tragic poet Phrynichus (‘little toad’). Pratinas, who seems to have been strongly didactic and prone to theorize in his poetry, was a reactionary many decades before Aristophanes attacked the ‘new music’ associated with Euripides and the dithyrambists.
See also Greece, §I.
H.W. Smyth, ed.: Greek Melic Poets (London and New York, 1900/R), 70ff, 341ff
E. Diehl, ed.: Anthologia lyrica graeca (Leipzig, 1925, rev. 3/1949–52/R by R. Beutler), v, 154ff
J.M. Edmonds, ed. and trans.: Lyra graeca, iii (London and Cambridge, MA, 1927, 2/1928/R), 46ff
D.L. Page, ed.: Poetae melici graeci (Oxford, 1962), 367ff
D.A. Campbell, ed.: Greek Lyric, iii (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1991), 318–27
H.W. Garrod: ‘The Hyporcheme of Pratinas’, Classical Review, xxxiv (1920), 129–36
A.W. Pickard-Cambridge: Dithyramb, Tragedy and Comedy (Oxford, 1927, rev. 2/1962 by T.B.L. Webster), 14ff, 65ff, 92ff
M. Pohlenz: ‘Das Satyrspiel und Pratinas von Phleious’, Göttingen gelehrten Nachrichten (Berlin, 1927), 298–321
K. Ziegler: ‘Tragoedia’, Paulys Real-Encyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft, 2nd ser., vi/2 (Stuttgart, 1937), 1899–2075
F. Stoessl: ‘Pratinas’, Paulys Real-Encyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft, xxii/2 (Stuttgart, 1954), 1721–4
W.D. Anderson: Ethos and Education in Greek Music (Cambridge, MA, 1966), 47–8
W.D. Anderson: Music and Musicians in Ancient Greece (Ithaca, NY, 1994), 86–93
WARREN ANDERSON/THOMAS J. MATHIESEN