Sophron, of Syracuse, writer of mimes, flourished about 430 BC.
He was the author of prose dialogues in the Doric dialect, containing both male and female characters, some serious, others humorous in style, and depicting scenes from the daily life of the Sicilian Greeks. Although in prose, they were regarded as poems; in any case they were not intended for stage representation. They were written in pithy and popular language, full of proverbs and colloquialisms.
Plato is said to have introduced them into Athens and to have made use of them in his dialogues; according to Suidas, they were Plato's constant companions, and he even slept with them under his pillow. Some idea of their general character may be gathered from the 2nd and 15th idylls of Theocritus, which are said to have been imitated from the ‘Aithrrpiai and ‘IcrOutii~ovqat of his Syracusan predecessor. Their influence is also to be traced in the satires of Persius. The fragments will be found in HL Ahrens's De graecae linguae dialectis (1843), ii. (app.). Latest edition by CJ Botzon (1867); see also his De Sophrone et Xenarcho mimographis (1856).
H informs that his original plan to edit Sophron afresh gave way in time to a decision to reprint, in a slightly abbreviated form, Kassel-Austin's text and critical apparatus as found in Poetae Comici Graeci I (previously, the fragments of Doric comedy could be read in Kaibel, Comicorum Graecorum fragmenta I.1, 1899).
In the intervening sixty-odd years, the fragments have not greatly changed in number, from the 175 in Olivieri to the 172 in H, and the greatest differences between the two editions are in the ordering (Olivieri was more confident in assigning uncertain fragments to known plays) and in the interpretation of individual words and expressions.
The most important accretion to the Sophron corpus in the last hundred years was the publication of an Egyptian papyrus by Norsa and Vitelli in 1932, early enough to be included in Olivieri's second edition.
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