Apollonides the Tragic Poet On the Virtues of Men and Women in Greek

On the Virtues of Men and Women is a collection of four brief poetic fragments attributed to the tragedian Apollonides. The Greek title, meaning "Extracts," indicates these are not passages from a single play but rather thematic selections preserved for their moral content. No complete play, plot, or characters survive from Apollonides's work. The fragments consist of moralizing sentiments, consistent with the collection's title. One notable excerpt contrasts wealth and virtue, declaring wealth to be the most beautiful of all things to the inexperienced but the most useless for the attainment of virtue to the experienced. The collected excerpts function primarily as ethical statements on human character.

These fragments survive solely through indirect transmission in later anthologies, most notably the extensive 5th-century CE compilation by Stobaeus. There is no independent manuscript tradition for Apollonides's work, and the standard modern edition is found within the comprehensive Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta. Apollonides remains a minor figure in the history of Greek tragedy, and his work has no traceable literary influence. His fragments are significant primarily for illustrating the practice of later compilers who excerpted sententious or philosophically resonant lines from lost tragedies. As such, they serve as a minor data point for scholars studying the vast and otherwise lost corpus of post-Classical Greek tragedy.