Phrynichus, (flourished c. 500 bc, Athens), Athenian tragic poet, an older contemporary of Aeschylus. Phrynichus is the earliest tragedian of whose work some conception can be formed.
Phrynichus’s first victory in the festival contests probably occurred about 510 bc, and he may have been the first to introduce female masks (i.e., female characters) into tragedy. After the Persians captured Athens’s former ally Miletus in 494, Phrynichus produced the tragedy The Capture of Miletus, which so harrowed Athenian feelings that he was fined. In 476, with the financial backing of the important Athenian democratic politician Themistocles, he won first prize in the Great Dionysia competition with Phoenissae (“Phoenician Women”), a play about the Greek victory over the Persian fleet at the battle of Salamis (480 bc) and the lamentation that followed at the court of the Persian king Xerxes. Of the many Greek tragedies whose titles have survived, The Capture of Miletus and Phoenissae, along with Aeschylus’s Persae (472 bc; “Persians”), are the only 5th-century tragedies that have historical subject matter.