PHERECRATES  ,

Greek poet of the Old Attic Comedy, was a contemporary of Cratinus, Crates and Aristophanes . At first an actor, he seems to have gained a prize for a play in 438 B.C . The only other ascertained date in his life is 420, when he produced his play The Wild Men . Like Crates, whom he imitated, he abandoned personal satire for more general themes, although in some of the fragments of his plays we find him attacking Alcibiades and others . He was especially famed for his inventive imagination, and the elegance and purity of his diction are attested by the epithet arruccararos (most Attic) applied to him by Athenaeus and the sophist Phrynichus . He was the inventor of a new metre, called after him Pherecratean, which frequently occurs in the choruses of Greek tragedies and in Horace . A considerable number of fragments from his 16 (or . 13) plays has been preserved, collected in T . Kock, Comicorum Atticorum Fragmenta, i . (188o), and A . Meineke, Poetarum Comicorum Graecorum Fragmenta (1855) . Para position, or by oxidizing ortho-hydroxydiaminodiphenylamines (R .

Nietzki, Ber., 1895, 28, p . 2976; 0 .

Fischer, ibid., 1896, 29, I p . 1874) . They are yellowish-red solids, which behave as weak bases, their salts undergoing hydrolytic dissociation in aqueous solution . When heated with concentrated hydrochloric acid the amino group is replaced by the hydroxyl group and the phenolic eurhodols are produced . The symmetrical diaminophenazine is the parent substance of the important dyestuff toluylene red or dimethyldiaminotoluphenazine . It is obtained by the oxidation of orthophenylene diamine with ferric chloride; when a mixture of para-aminodimethylaniline and meta-toluylenediamine is oxidized in the cold, toluylene blue, an indamine, being formed as an intermediate product and passing into the red when boiled; and also by the oxidation of dimethylparaphenylene diamine with metatoluylene diamine . It crystallizes in orange-red needles and its alcoholic solution fluoresces strongly . It dyes silk and mordanted cotton a fine scarlet . It is known commercially as neutral red . For the phenazonium salts see SAFRANINE .

Phenazone is an isomer of

phenazine, to which it bears the same relation that phenanthrene bears to anthracene . It is formed by reducing diortho-dinitrodiphenyl with sodium amalgam and methyl alcohol, or by heating diphenylene-ortho-dihydrazine with hydrochloric acid to 15o° C . It crystallizes in needles which melt at 156° C . Potassium permanganate oxidizes it to pyridazine tetra-carboxylic acid . or (X:\/~//) N: \ Phenazine . Phenazone .