Agathon

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In Purgatorio XXII, Statius reviews the poets known in antiquity: after the five Latin poets (Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Lucan, and Statius himself) and Homer, he mentions the Greeks, and among these appears Agathon, in the company of Euripides, Simonides, and others. The authorized note to canto XXII, line 106, indicates that Dante could have known only the names of these Greek poets, drawn from Latin authors such as Cicero and Quintilian or from Aristotle. The verse places him on Parnassus, the mount of the Muses, where the poets gather to converse together: it is the same Parnassus evoked by note 104 commenting on v. 104 ('ragioniam del monte…'), where the dialogue among poets, already imagined in Inferno IV, continues.