EPICHARMUS (c. B.c.), Greek comic poet, was born in Cos. Early in life he went to Megara in Sicily, and after its destruction by Gelon (484) removed to Syracuse, where he lived at the court of Hieron till his death at the age of go or (according to a statement in Lucian, Macrobii, 25) 97. The inhabitants set up a statue in his honour with an inscription by Theocritus (Epigr. 17). Epicharmus was the chief represent ative of the Sicilian or Dorian comedy. Of his works 35 titles and a few fragments have survived. In the city of tyrants it would have been dangerous to present political comedies, like those of Aristophanes at Athens; Epicharmus' plays, therefore, are either mythological travesties (resembling the satyric drama of Athens) or character comedies. To the first class belong the Busiris, in which Heracles appears as a voracious glutton; the Marriage of Hebe, remarkable for a long list of dainties. The second class dealt with different classes of the population (the sailor, the prophet, the boor, the parasite). Some of the plays seem to have bordered on the political, as The Plunderings, describing the devastation of Sicily in the time of the poet. A short fragment has been discovered (in the Rainer papyri) from the 'Ohvo rebs abroµoXos, which told how Odysseus entered Troy disguised as a beggar and obtained valuable information. Another feature of his works was the large number of sentiments expressed in proverbial form ; the Pythagoreans claimed him as a member of their school. The metres employed by Epicharmus were iambic trimeter, and especially trochaic and anapaestic tetrameter.
Epicharmus is the subject of articles in Suidas and Diogenes Laertius (viii. 3). See A. O. Lorenz, Leben and Schriften des Koers E. (with account of the Doric drama and fragments, 1864) ; J. Girard, Etudes sur la poesie grecque (1884) ; Kaibel in Pauly-Wissowa's Realency klopddie, according to whom Epicharmus was a Siceliot; for the papyrus fragment, Blass in Jahrbiicher fur Philologie, cxxxix., 1889.