a tragic poet of Athens, was the son of Polyphradmon or Phradmon, and the disciple of the celebrated Thespis, being a little earlier than Aeschylus. He gained the tragic prize, n. c. 511, and is said to have introduced several improvements into the dramatic art, bringing on the stage female characters, and making the actors adopt the use of masks instead of disfiguring their faces with the lees of wine. Suidas mentions the names of nine of his tragedies, and ascribes to another Phrynicus, son of Melanthus, a tragedy entitled *The Sack of Miletus*, which recalled so forcibly to the Athenians the melancholy fate of that Greek city, that they punished the poet by a fine of a thousand Attic drachmas; or, according to Aelian, banished him from Athens. As the son of Phradmon is said to have died in Sicily, probably at the court of Hiero, where Aeschylus also took refuge, it is not unlikely that this tragedy may have been his production.

**Phrynicus**, one of the last writers of the old comedy at Athens, flourished n. c. 435, and was the contemporary of Eupolis, Euripides, and Aristophanes. He obtained the second prize, n. c. 406, the year before Athens was taken by the Spartans. Plutarch states, that in one of his plays he defended Alcibiades when he was accused of having mutilated the statues of Hermes. Aristophanes ridicules Phrynicus for introducing too frequently on the stage characters in low life. The fragments of Phrynicus have been collected by Morel, *Ex Veterum Comicorum Fabulis quae integra non extant*, Par. 1553; by Hertelius, *Veterissimorum Comicorum Sententiae*, Bile, 1560; and by Grotius, *Excerpta ex Tragediis et Comediarum Gr. Lat. Par. 1626.

**Phrynicus Arrhabius**, a Greek grammarian, was a native of Bithynia, and flourished about the middle of the second century, in the reigns of Marcus Aurelius and of Commodus. He had devoted much time to the study of the Greek language, which he pretended to speak and write in the utmost purity. He made a collection of all the words used in the Attic dialect, of which an abridgment has been preserved under the title *Elogia Nominae et Verborum Atticorum*. He rejected every word which could not be found in some work of Plato, Thucydides, or Demosthenes, and was particularly severe on the style of Menander. This little work, published first by Calliergi, Rome, 1517, was reprinted at Venice, 1524; but the best edition is that of C. A. Lobeck, with learned annotations, Leipzig, 1820, 8vo. Phrynicus had also collected examples of every different kind of style, in the form of a dictionary, divided into thirty-five books, which he dedicated to the Emperor Commodus. This compilation, entitled *Apparatus Rhetoricius sive Sophisticus*, was still extant in the time of Photius. Some fragments remain, which have been published by Montfaucon in the *Bibliotheca Coisliniana*, p. 465-69.