Harry Thurston Peck, Harpers Dictionary of Classical Antiquities (1898)

---

Rhinthon

（Ῥίνθων). A Greek comic poet, son of a potter of Tarentum, who lived about B.C. 300, and invented a style of composition of his own, which was much diffused in Magna Graecia, and is said to have been imitated even by the Romans. It was called the Hilarotragoedia (Ἱλαροτραγῳδία） —i. e. cheerful tragedy. It was a travesty of tragic myths by the intermixture of comic scenes. The scanty fragments of the thirty-eight plays of Rhinthon do not give us any adequate idea of this kind of composition. See Parodia.