Carcinus

Who is Carcinus?

Carcinus was an Ancient Greek tragedian, and was a member of a family including Xenocles and his grandfather Carcinus of Agrigentum. He received a prize for only one out of his one hundred and sixty plays, many of them composed at the court of Dionysius II of Syracuse. Only nine titles, with associated fragments, of his plays have survived: Achilles, Aerope or Thyestes, Ajax, Alope, Amphiaraus, Oedipus, Orestes, Semele, and Tyro. He and his sons were lampooned by Aristophanes at the end of The Wasps and in Peace.

All three of those sons became playwrights.

Carcinus is mentioned briefly by Aristotle. In the Poetics, Chapter 17, Aristotle discusses the necessity for a playwright to see the composition on the stage, rather than just in print, in order to weed out any inconsistencies. Aristotle points to an unnamed play of Carcinus which had a character, Amphiaraus, exit a temple. For some reason, this seemed outrageously inconsistent when viewed on the stage, and the audience "hissed" the actors right off the stage. It seems this particular inconsistency was not easily recognised by merely reading the script.